Sahib (2 page)

The title ‘sahib’ could be casually granted or hard won. Civil servant Walter Lawrence had to supervise the hanging of ‘a burly, wild-looking Pathan’ who had confessed to murder but maintained that his young accomplice was innocent. Lawrence tried to get the youngster’s sentence reduced, but failed. ‘I do not think you are faithless,’ said the Pathan, ‘and I will make one more appeal to you. I am
kotwal
[a policeman or magistrate] in my village, and my enemies will ask the government to sequestrate my land, and my daughter will be landless and lost.’ Lawrence was able to ensure that the daughter would inherit, and on the day of the hanging he saw ‘a pretty girl of about fourteen years, who made a graceful obeisance of farewell to her father and of thanks to me’.
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He was a sahib again.

The word sahib went even farther. The common suffix
log
(meaning people) was used to produce
baba-log
for children,
bandar-log
for the monkeys in Kipling’s
Jungle Book
or the insulting
budmash-log
for ruffians or villains
(shaitan-log
the devil’s people, was even worse, so bad that a distinguished relative of mine thought it applicable to successive governments), and gave
sahib-log,
which might also be used to describe European gentry. This was a more polite word than
gora-log,
used to mean Europeans in general or, as Yule and Burnell would have it, ‘any European who is not a sahib’.
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The term could be used as a deliberate insult, and more than one Indian who died on the scaffold during the suppression of the Mutiny, bravely told
the
gora-log
exactly what he thought of them. Adding
pucka
(from the Hindustani for ripe, mature, cooked) gave
pucka sahib,
which still does duty in old-fashioned colloquial English to mean a proper gentleman.
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The prefix
mem
gave
memsahib,
the term for a European lady, although as late as the 1880s this was generally used only in the Bengal presidency. Madam Sahib was the Bombay version, and
doresani,
from
doray,
the South Indian equivalent of sahib, was popular in Madras.

For the purposes of this book sahib is used in its broadest sense to mean all British soldiers serving in India, from
sahib-log
of the most refined sort, to
gora-log,
red of face and coat, intent on mischief in the bazaar. This account is firmly based on their own writings, in the form of letters home and diaries – a respectable stream of which is preserved in the Oriental and India Office Collections of the British Library and the National Army Museum. As far as printed sources are concerned, in addition to examining such well-known accounts as Frederick Roberts’s
Forty-One Years in India
and Garnet Wolseley’s
The Story of a Soldier’s Life,
I was able, thanks largely to that wonderful repository of the long-forgotten, the Prince Consort Library in Aldershot, to use far scarcer memoirs such as W. G. Osborne’s
The Court and Camp of Runjeet Singh
and James Wood’s
Gunner at Large.
There are fewer accounts here by private soldiers and NCOs than I would have wished, but Privates Waterfield and Ryder carry their muskets with HM’s 32nd Foot, and Sergeant John Pearman plies his sabre with HM’s 3rd Light Dragoons. I have also included the experiences of the men’s families – the women who followed them from camp to camp, bore their children, nursed them as they died, and all too often died themselves. The inimitable John Shipp, twice commissioned from the ranks, makes his appearance, and that staunch freemason, Sergeant Major George Carter, tells of life in 2nd Bengal Fusiliers. We also have Subadar Sita Ram – who served with a regiment of the Bengal Native Infantry in the first half of the nineteenth century – on hand to give us his own view of the British army in India:

There were eight English officers in my regiment, and the Captain of my company was a real sahib – just as I had imagined
all sahibs to be. His name was ‘Burrumpeel’. He was six feet three inches tall, his chest was as broad as the monkey god’s, and he was tremendously strong. He often used to wrestle with the sepoys and won universal admiration when he was in the wrestling arena. He had learnt all the throws and no sepoy could defeat him. This officer was always known amongst ourselves as the ‘Wrestler’. Nearly all our officers had nicknames by which we knew them. One was the ‘Prince’ sahib, and another was known as the ‘Camel’ because he had a long neck. Another we called ‘Damn’ sahib because he always said that word when he gave an order.
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Three categories of British soldiers served in India. Firstly, there were what we might now call mercenaries, serving Indian rulers in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, although the term mercenary then had few of its modern pejorative connotations, and ‘soldiers of fortune’ would be a kinder description. Next, there were officers and NCOs of the East India Company’s native regiments, and officers, NCOs and men of the Company’s Europeans, regiments such as the Bengal Fusiliers and the Bengal Horse Artillery. All of these folk had made a conscious decision to serve in India, though many of them lived to regret it: the diarist and sybarite William Hickey no sooner arrived there as a junior officer in the Company’s service than he set off back to England only to reappear in India as a civilian, less trammelled by rules and regulations.

Finally there were regiments of the British army, horse and foot, who served in India for terms ranging from a few years to more than twenty-five. To distinguish them from local units they bore the prefix HM’s in front of their regimental number – such as HM’s 31st and HM’s 50th who fought so hard in the wars against the Sikhs in 1845–46 and 1848–49. Some of their officers had often deliberately exchanged into regiments that were bound for India, where living was cheap and rich pickings beckoned, eighteenth-century India being known, after a coin long current in the south, as ‘the land of the pagoda tree’, which simply had to be shaken to rain money.

The ordinary soldier, however, had little choice but to follow his regiment wherever it was posted. In 1839, Private Charles Goodward (whose stocky build gave him the nickname ‘Tubb’) arrived in India
to join HM’s 16th Lancers, a regiment which had already been there for sixteen years and seemed likely to stay a good deal longer.

It was a disappointment … felt by the Regiment … after all our hopes … of our near return to dear … old England to find … that yet another campaign was in store for us … when at last orders from the Governor-General were read to us, stating that in the present state of the Country he could not deem it expedient to send the 16th Lancers home.
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Although these three categories of soldier were organisationally distinct, there was a good deal of migration between them. James Skinner started his military career as a mercenary and died a British officer, while Captain Felix Smith, late of HM’s 36th Regiment, was mortally wounded under the command of one of the most remarkable of all the soldiers of fortune, George Thomas, a Tipperarian who had probably deserted from the Royal Navy and went on to establish his own state, ruled from his eponymously named fortress, Georgegarh. Some British soldiers were persuaded, by a substantial bounty, to transfer from HM’s service to the Company’s when their regiments left India. Conversely, the so-called ‘White Mutiny’ of 1859–61 arose when soldiers in the Company’s service declined to consider themselves re-enlisted into the British army when the Crown assumed full responsibility for India. Henry Havelock was a British officer but spent almost all his career in India; Frederick Roberts was a Bengal artilleryman who won his Victoria Cross in suppressing the Indian Mutiny and met his end, a field marshal and a peer, on the Western Front in 1914.

For most of this period, British people living in India spoke of themselves as Anglo-Indian, but the term has now generally come to refer to people of mixed race, or Eurasians. These folk were
karani-log
to native Indians, and Walter Lawrence observed that in his time ‘they are no longer called Eurasians but “Anglo-Indians” … I fear that the change of name will not improve the lot of this luckless and unprotected people’, squeezed in the vice between two cultures, fully trusted by neither side, and mocked for their use of English. Even the otherwise generous Lawrence noted that ‘I heard a mother saying of her two daughters: “She is a dull, and she is a naughty’”.
¹²
The term ‘half caste’ went from being a blunt description to an insult.
Andrew, one of Sir John Bennet Hearsey’s mixed-race children, horse-whipped the editor of
The Pioneer
for publishing an article by none other than the young Kipling, in which he was thus described. ‘It is false,’ yelled Hearsey;

I will have my proper people treated with proper respect, and called by their proper name, and that is Anglo-Indians. The descendants of the Saxons and British were called Anglo-Saxons, their descendants with the Normans were called Anglo-Normans, and we are therefore Anglo-Indians.
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The change in status of the Anglo-Indian owed much to a wider change in attitudes that separated Georgian gentlemen, who often raised their mixed-race children with pride, from the Victorians who were much more sniffy about such things. Matters were hardly helped when, in 1792, the Court of Directors of the Honourable East India Company decided to debar mixed-race men from its service. ‘No person, the son of a native Indian,’ ran its decree, ‘shall henceforth be appointed by this court to appointments in the Civil, Military or Marine Services of the company.’ Eventually mixed-race men were allowed to serve as bandsmen or farriers, but while Indians could serve as native officers, with ranks such as
jemadar
and
subadar,
combatant military service was closed to sons of the very frequent liaisons between British men and Indian women.

Perhaps the most outstanding mixed-race figure in British India was the aforementioned Lieutenant Colonel James Skinner, born in 1778, who was proud to acknowledge that:

My father was a native of Scotland, in the Company’s service; my mother was a Rajpootree, the daughter of a
zamindar … 
who was taken prisoner at the age of fourteen … My father then an ensign into whose hands she fell, treated her with great kindness, and she bore him six children, three girls and three boys. The former were all married to gentlemen in the Company’s service; my elder brother, David, went to sea; I myself became a soldier, and my younger brother, Robert, followed my example.
¹⁴

Despite services of which any British officer might have been proud, there were constant difficulties over Skinner’s status, and when he
was recommended for the Companionship of the Order of the Bath there were complaints that he did not, strictly speaking, hold a commission, but enjoyed only local rank. One of his many supporters observed that: ‘Out of the numerous individuals in Spain and Portugal to whom brevet commissions have been granted, name one who has done more to serve the state.’
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The Court of Directors ruled in 1829 that:

Lieut-Colonel Skinner, holding from His Majesty the local rank of Lieut-Colonel in India, must necessarily entitle him to all the advantages arising from the possession of his commission; and, consequently, to take rank according to the date of it, with the officers of the King’s and our service … 
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James Skinner and his sons feature in these pages, and it would have been a very rash subordinate who withheld from them the title of sahib. If there are fewer mixed-race sahibs in these pages than there ought to be, you must blame the East India Company, not the author.

Although this is not a history of the Indian army, the story of the British soldier in India is so closely entwined with that of his Indian comrade in arms that I can draw no sharp distinctions: nor would I wish to. Though relations between British and Indian soldiers were never quite the same after the great Mutiny of 1857–58, on either side of this shocking and traumatic episode there were often close and cordial relations between British and Indian soldiers, and a sense of shared endeavour curls across the period like that most pervasive of Indian scents, the smoke from cow-dung fires. A stone in the little Pakistani town of Gilgit – where the Karakoram highway winds down from the Hunza valley and the Chinese border – pays tribute to the memory of Captain Claye Ross of the 14th Sikhs, killed near Korgah on 10 March 1895, and also ‘to that of 45 brave Sikhs who were killed at the same time’. Although the abundant source material enables me to do justice to the British soldiers who served in India, neither the available records nor my own linguistic limitations enable me to write with such confidence about Jack Sepoy.
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First to last there was something wholly distinctive about soldiering in India. To some it became a passion verging on the obsessional, far less to do with big ideas such as ‘Empire’ than a compelling personal involvement in the big bright caravanserai of an army that was entirely
sui generis,
never more or less than Anglo-Indian. Ensign William Hodson, a clergyman’s son and, unusually for the age, a university graduate, saw the pre-Mutiny army in all its ancient splendour as he moved up to his first battle, Mudki, in December 1845:

I wonder more every day at the ease and magnitude of the arrangements, and the varied and interesting picture continually before our eyes. Soon after 4 a.m. the bugle sounds the reveille and the whole mass is astir at once. The smoke of the evening fires has by this time blown away and everything stands out clear and defined in the bright moonlight. The sepoys bring the straw from their tents and make fires to warm their black faces on all sides and the groups of swarthy redcoats stooping over the blaze with a white background of canvas and the dark clear sky behind all produces a most picturesque effect as one turns out into the cold. The multitude of camels, horses and elephants, in all imaginable groups and positions – the groans and cries of the former as they stoop and kneel for their burdens, the neighing of the hundreds of horses mingling with the shouts of the innumerable servants and their masters’ calls, the bleating of the sheep and goats, and, louder than all, the shrill screams of the Hindoo women, almost bedevil one’s senses as one treads one’s way through the canvas streets and squares to the place where the regiment assembles outside the camp.