The Dark Defile (4 page)

Ranjit Singh had followed the civil wars in Afghanistan with close attention. In 1819 he had profited from the chaos to take Kashmir from the Afghans, and he also had designs on Peshawar, where a decade earlier Elphinstone had courted Shah Shuja. The Sikh ruler would find the British his firm friends as he pursued his goals because events in the wider world were moving to his advantage.

The Russian menace was growing. Russia had already wrung a number of concessions from Persia when in 1828 Czar Nicholas and his generals forced the Treaty of Turkmanchai on the Persians. This treaty not only annexed further territories to Russia, including Yerevan, the modern-day capital of Armenia and the surrounding area, but gave Russia territorial rights within Persia itself, among them the freedom to station “consuls” wherever it wished, as well as exclusive commercial privileges. A British officer captured the contemporary British perception of Russia:
“Peradventure that black and ominous eagle, which has so long been perched upon the rocks overhanging the Caspian Sea, looking around with keen eye, and in imagination devouring the rich provinces of Asia, may at last take a daring flight towards the Indus, and at once settle all our worldly affairs.”
British foreign secretary Lord Aberdeen put it more bluntly, writing of Russia’s increasingly commanding position in Western and Central Asia,
“Russia holds the keys.”
He was determined they should not use them to unlock the gates of India.

Chapter Two

Commerce is the grand panacea … Not a bale of merchandise leaves our shores but it bears the seeds of intelligence and fruitful thought to the members of some less enlightened community.

—RICHARD COBDEN, ECONOMIST AND ADVOCATE OF FREE TRADE

With Russia so close and Persia no longer an ally to be relied on, Ranjit Singh with his presence on the central Indus was becoming ever more important to British strategy. In January 1831, a young Scottish officer named Alexander Burnes was ordered to set sail up the Indus with a gift of English dray horses for Britain’s Sikh ally.
⁷
However, the mission had another, deeper purpose. Burnes was to do a little espionage by assessing the navigability of the Indus and thus its suitability as a conduit for British trade and influence. As one British government minister wrote,
“No British flag has ever floated upon the waters of this river. Please God it shall, and in triumph.”

Alexander Burnes was born in Montrose, on Scotland’s east coast, and his great-grandfather was the uncle of Scotland’s national poet Robert Burns, who spelled his surname differently. He had arrived in India in 1821 as a sixteen-year-old East India Company cadet and followed the then standard advice to aspiring young officers:
“Mind you study the native languages, sir!”
He quickly learned Hindi and then Persian and Arabic. As a slight young man of only middling height who loathed exercise and throve on argument, he must have seemed quite unusual to the other cadets. Promotions came swiftly, and, deeply curious about the people and customs of India, he traveled whenever his duties allowed. In 1829 he was transferred to the company’s elite Political Department, which provided far greater opportunities and excitement for able young officers than did garrison duty with their regiments, awaiting their turn for promotion. “Politicals,” as they were known, habitually dressed in black frock coats. They served not only in the company’s headquarters in Calcutta but also as advisers to rulers of states allied to the company, as well as undertaking special or secret missions. Burnes was delighted, seeing himself “on the high road … to office, emolument and honour.” He was first appointed assistant to the company’s resident in Kutch and then two years later to lead the survey of the Indus.

At this time British knowledge of the river was vague. The only available accounts of much of its course were, as Burnes noted, those of Arrian, Curtius and the other ancient historians of Alexander’s expedition, which had returned eastward down it after defeating Porus. Yet a senior company official observed,
“The navigation of the Indus is important in every point of view.”
The reason was commercial as well as political. If British cottons and woolens could be sent north up the river, Britain could challenge the Russians, who were able to convey their goods economically to Central Asia by way of the River Volga and the Caspian Sea. Thus Britain
“might succeed in underselling the Russians and in obtaining for ourselves a large portion at least of the internal trade of Central Asia … our first object being to introduce English goods and not Englishmen into Kabul and Central Asia,”
wrote Lord Ellenborough, president of the Board of Control in London.

However, the emirs of Sind, through whose lands the lower portion of the Indus flowed, remained deeply suspicious of the British, and a British expedition could not pass through Sind without some plausible pretext. This was provided by the dapple gray stallion and four mares dispatched from England to Ranjit Singh in return for some Kashmiri shawls that he had sent to King William IV. There was no doubt that the safest way of transporting the horses to the maharaja’s capital of Lahore was up the Indus, and to allay the emirs’ suspicions further, an official suggested that a large gilded carriage should also be sent
“since the size and bulk of it would render it obvious that the mission could then only proceed by water.”

Not everyone agreed with the subterfuge. Sir Charles Metcalfe, the man sent twenty years earlier to negotiate with Ranjit Singh and now a member of the governor-general’s council, denounced
“the scheme of surveying the Indus, under the pretence of sending a present to Rajah Ranjit Singh”
as “a trick unworthy of our government, which cannot fail, when detected, as most probably it will be, to excite the jealousy and indignation of the powers on whom we play it … It is not impossible that it may lead to war.”

Such objections were overruled. Alexander Burnes received secret instructions to conduct a clandestine but comprehensive survey of the Indus, including its depth, breadth and direction of flow,
“its facilities for steam navigation, the supply of fuel on its banks, and the condition of the princes and people who possess the country bordering on it.”
Furthermore: “Your own knowledge and reflection will suggest to you various other particulars in which full information is highly desirable; and the slow progress of the boats up the Indus will, it is hoped, give you every opportunity to pursue your researches.” As he prepared for the long journey to Lahore, Burnes decided that taking troops with him would only invite hostility and selected just three companions—Ensign J. D. Leckie of the Bombay Infantry, company surveyor Mohammed Ali and an Indian doctor—along with servants to look after them.

After shipping the horses and carriage up the coast from Bombay to Mandvi in Kutch, on the morning of 21 January 1831 Burnes and his party set sail from there in a flotilla of five vessels, hugging the coast before turning into the delta of the Indus. As they made their slow progress, Burnes went to work taking twenty bearings daily, but the emirs of Sind greeted his approach with the hostility and skepticism the British had anticipated. They shared the views of a holy man who, watching the vessels sail by, cried out,
“Alas! Sind is now gone, since the English have seen the river, which is the road to its conquest.
” Fourteen years later the British indeed annexed Sind, but for the moment the emirs refused to allow Burnes into their lands and their soldiers harassed the expedition. While he waited impatiently for permission to proceed, storms battered his little fleet, and Sindi and Baluchi tribesmen fired off their matchlocks and promised to slit the throats of every man on board. The emirs only relented when the British authorities in India threatened them with invasion.

Mooring near Hyderabad, the principal city in Sind, Burnes was received by its superbly jeweled emir, to whom he presented a gun, a brace of pistols, a gold watch, two telescopes, a clock, some English shawls and cloths and two pairs of elegant cut-glass candlesticks. The emir was friendlier than Burnes had anticipated, perhaps because a few years earlier Burnes’s doctor brother James, also traveling through the area, had cured him of a dangerous illness. He even allowed the expedition to voyage onward aboard his state barge, which was, Burnes wrote, “about sixty feet long, and had three masts, on which we hoisted as many sails, made of alternate stripes of red and white cloth.” They sailed along, helped by a fair wind and a sixteen-man crew happily smoking
bhang
—marijuana.

At Khairpur, the ruler—a cousin of the emir of Hyderabad—sent gifts of sheep, spices, sugar, tobacco and opium, and a courtier told Burnes gravely that astronomers had foretold that “the English would in time possess all India … for the stars and heaven proclaimed the fortune of the English!” Toward the end of May 1831, Burnes and his party left the Indus and entered the Chenab River and on 8 June finally reached Ranjit Singh’s borders. Here one of his courtiers, mounted on a magnificent elephant, welcomed them, assuring them that Ranjit Singh “was deeply sensible of the honour conferred upon him by the King of England, and that his army had been for some time in readiness on the frontier to chastise the barbarians of Sind,” who had long arrested the progress of Burnes and his men. The Sikh soldiers impressed Burnes: “[They are] tall and bony men, with a very martial carriage: the most peculiar part of their dress is a small flat turban, which becomes them well; they wear long hair, and from the knee downwards do not cover the leg.”

After branching off again, this time down the Ravi River, in mid-July Burnes and his party after a seven-hundred-mile river journey at last approached Lahore. The sun was going down, and on the distant horizon, he reported, “[I saw] the massy mountains which encircle Kashmir clothed in a mantle of white snow. I felt a nervous sensation of joy as I first gazed on the Himalayas.” Three days later, Burnes and his companions rode into the city on elephants preceded by the great coach and the dray horses. Dismounting in the courtyard of Ranjit Singh’s palace, they were conducted inside. “While stooping to remove my shoes at the threshold,” Burnes recounted, “I suddenly found myself in the arms and tight embrace of a diminutive old-looking man—the great Maharajah Ranjit Singh.”

The maharaja was, in fact, only forty-three. He was short—barely five feet three inches—but Burnes reflected that “there must be a mighty contrast between his mind and body.” Taking Burnes by the hand, Ranjit Singh led him into a marble hall where a pavilion of silken cloth studded with gems had been erected and courtiers all dressed in yellow waited. Also present to participate in the festivities was the thirty-seven-year-old Captain Claude Wade, the company’s political officer responsible for the Punjab. Wade had made the short journey from his headquarters at Ludhiana, the company’s forward station for its northwestern territories, where his special responsibilities were keeping watch over both Shah Shuja and British relations with the Sikhs. Wade, son of a colonel in the Bengal army, had been serving in India since 1809 and was able but intellectually stubborn.

Burnes presented the cloth of gold bag containing the official letter he had brought from Lord Ellenborough. So gratified was the Sikh ruler with its protestations of friendship and admiration that he ordered a peal of artillery from sixty guns, each firing twenty-one times. With the cacophony still resounding, he and Burnes went to see the gift of “horses of the gigantic breed which is peculiar to England,” described in Ellenborough’s letter. The sight of them, “excited his utmost surprise and wonder, their size and colour pleased him: he said they were little elephants.”

The gift had certainly been well chosen. Ranjit Singh, who was said to be fond of reciting the couplet:

Four things greater than all things are,

Women, and Horses, and Power, and War

was passionate about horses. Burnes soon had the opportunity to observe the maharajah’s passion for women when, one evening, Ranjit Singh invited him to view his fabled female “soldiers.” Something of a womanizer himself, Burnes enjoyed the spectacle of thirty or forty bejeweled dancing girls, dressed like boys but in flowing silks, with bows and quivers in their hands and gold dust around their eyes. “This is one of my regiments, but they tell me it is one I cannot discipline,” Ranjit Singh joked.

The maharaja was also keen to discuss more serious matters, quizzing Burnes about the navigability of the Indus and asking Burnes’s opinion of his army and of the European officers he employed to train it. He acknowledged frankly that he would like to make the rich provinces of Sind his own and said he was curious to understand the relative strength of the European powers.

The maharaja made much of Burnes, inviting him to breakfast on rice, sugar, milk and preserved mangoes served on banana leaves, and sending him the wine mixed with pearls and precious gems of which he himself was “immoderately fond.” In his turn, Burnes admired the maharaja, whom he thought “an extraordinary character” whose two great weapons of diplomacy were “cunning and conciliation.” However, Burnes doubted whether he had long to live since “his chest is contracted, his back is bent, his limbs withered, and it is not likely that he can long bear up against a nightly dose of spirits more ardent than the strongest brandy.”

While in Lahore, Burnes explored the city, finding the tall houses handsome but the streets narrow and “offensively filthy” from the open sewers running down their center. He inspected the city’s mosques, where, as elsewhere in the Sikh Punjab, Muslims were required to pray in silence. He also talked to some of Ranjit Singh’s French officers who had previously been in the service of the Persians and had traveled extensively. They talked of cities Burnes had never seen: Herat, Kandahar, Ghazni and Kabul in Afghanistan and farther-flung near-mythic places beyond the Oxus River like Bokhara. The Frenchmen’s accounts caught Burnes’s imagination—especially when they described places vanquished by his revered namesake Alexander—but good British agent that he was, he also recorded regretfully that “the French have much better information of these countries than ourselves.”