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Chapter 2

It was not strange that, for some time after the occurrence of these events in the Coast Army, the English in Southern India should have been possessed by a common sense of anger, and that this feeling should have spread to some other parts of the country. For a while the white man saw a conspirator beneath the folds of every turban, and a conspiracy in every group of people talking by the wayside. In every laugh there was an insult, and in every shrug there was a menace. English officers pillowed their heads on loaded fire-arms, and fondled the hilts of their swords as they slept. But gradually they lived down the sensitiveness that so distressed them. Other thoughts and feelings took possession of the bungalow; other subjects were dominant in the mess-room.

Mutiny of Madras Officers, 1809

And ere long a new grievance came to supersede an old danger; and the officers of the Madras Army forgot the rebellion of the Sipahis as they incubated a rebellion of their own. How the mutiny of the officers grew out of the mutiny of the men of the Coast Army, it would not be difficult to show; but the chapter of Indian history which includes the former need not be re-written here. The objects for which the officers contended were altogether remote from the interests and sympathies of the Sipahis; and although the latter, in ignorance, might at first have followed their commanders, it is not probable that they would have continued to cast in their lot with the mutineers, after the true character of the movement had been explained to them, and an appeal made to their fidelity by the State. But they were not unobservant spectators of that unseemly strife; and the impression made upon the Sipahi’s mind by this spectacle of disunion must have been of a most injurious kind. There is nothing so essential to time permanence of that Opinion, on which we so much rely, as a prevailing sense that the English in India are not Many but One.

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Nor was it strange that, after these unfortunate events, the fame of which went abroad throughout the whole country, there should have been for a little space less eagerness than before to enlist into the service of the Company. But the reluctance passed away under the soothing influence of time. In the prompt and regular issue of pay, and in the pensions, which had all the security of funded property, there were attractions, unknown to Asiatic armies, not easily to be resisted. And there were other privileges, equally dear to the people of the country, which lured them by thousands into the ranks of the Company’s Army. As soon as his name was on the muster-roll, the Sipahi, and through him all the members of his family, passed under the special protection of the State.

The English Soldier

It is difficult to conceive two conditions of life more dissimilar in their social aspects than soldiering in India and soldiering in England. In England few men enlist into the Army as an honourable profession, or seek it as an advantageous source of subsistence. Few men enter it with any high hopes or any pleasurable emotions. The recruit has commonly broken down as a civilian. Of ruined fortune and bankrupt reputation, he is tempted, cheated, snared into the Army. Lying placards on the walls, lying words in the pot-house, the gaudy ribbons of Sergeant Kite, the drum and the fife and the strong drink, captivate and enthral him when he is not master of himself. He has quarrelled with his sweetheart or robbed his employer. He has exhausted the patience of his own people, and the outer world has turned its back upon him. And so he goes for a soldier. As soon as he has taken the shilling, he has gone right out of the family circle and out of the circle of civil life. He is a thousandth part of a regiment of the Line. Perhaps he has changed his name and stripped himself of his personal identity. Anyhow, he is as one dead. Little more is heard of him; and unless it be some doting old mother, who best loves the blackest sheep of the flock, nobody much wishes to hear. It is often, indeed, no greater source of pride to an English family to know that one of its members is serving the Queen, in the ranks of her Army, than to know that one is provided for, as a convict, at the national expense.

The Indian soldier

But the native soldier of India was altogether of a different kind. When he became a soldier, he did not cease to be a civilian. He severed no family

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ties; he abandoned no civil rights. He was not the outcast, but the stay and pride of his house. He visited his home at stated times. He remitted to it a large part of his pay. It was a decorous boast in many families that generation after generation had eaten the Company’s salt. Often, indeed, in one household you might see the Past, the Present, and the Future of this coveted military service. There was the ancient pensioner under the shade of the banyan-tree in his native village, who had stories to tell of Lawrence, Coote, and Medows; of battles fought with the French; of the long war with Haidar and the later struggles with his son.

Abercrombie and Lake

There was the Sipahi, on furlough from active service, in the prime of his life, who had his stories also to tell of “the great Lord’s brother,” the younger Wellesley, of Harris and Baird, perhaps of “Bikrum Sahib” and Egypt, how “Lick Sahib,” the fine old man, when provisions were scarce in the camp, had ridden through the lines, eating dried pulse for his dinner. And there was the bright-eyed, supple-limbed, quick-witted boy, who looked forward with eager expectancy to the time when he would be permitted to take his father’s place, and serve under some noted leader. It was no fond delusion, no trick of our self-love, to believe in such pictures as this. The Company’s Sipahis had a genuine pride in their colours, and the classes from which they were drawn rejoiced in their connection with the paramount State. It was honourable service, sought by the very flower of the people, and to be dismissed from it was a heavy punishment and a sore disgrace.

Civil privileges of the Sipahi

Strong as were these ties, the people were bound to the military service of the Company by the still stronger ties of self-interest. For not only were the Sipahis, as has been said, well cared for as soldiers – well paid and well pensioned – but, as civilians, they had large privileges which others did not enjoy. Many of them, belonging to the lesser yeomanry of the country, were possessors of, or share-holders in, small landed estates; and, thus endowed, they rejoiced greatly in a regulation which gave the Sipahi on furlough a right to be heard before other suitors in our civil courts103.

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In a country whose people are inordinately given to litigation, and where justice is commonly slow-paced, this was so prodigious a boon, that entrance to the service was often sought for the express purpose of securing this valuable precedence, and the soldier-member of the family thus became the representative of his whole house. In this connection of the soldiery with hereditary rights in the soil, there was an additional guarantee for his loyalty and good conduct. He was not merely a soldier – a component unit of number two company, third file from the right; he was an important member of society, a distinct individuality in his native village no less than in his cantonment Lines. He retained his self-respect and the respect of others; and had a personal interest in the stability of the Government under which his rights were secured.

And whilst these extraneous advantages were attached to his position as a soldier of the Company, there was nothing inherent in the service itself to render it distasteful to him.

The Sipahi and his Officer

His officers were aliens of another colour and another creed; but the Hindu was accustomed to foreign supremacy, and the Muhammadan, profoundly impressed with the mutabilities of fortune, bowed himself to the stern necessities of fate. As long as the Sipahi respected the personal qualities of the English officer, and the English officer felt a personal attachment for the Sipahi, the relations between them were in no degree marred by any considerations of difference of race. There was a strong sense of comradeship between them, which atoned for the absence of other ties. The accidental severance of which I have spoken was but short-lived104. In that first quarter of the present century, which saw so much hard fighting in the field, the heart of the Sipahi officer again turned

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towards his men, and the men looked up and clung to him with a childlike confidence and affection. To command a company, and in due course, a regiment of Sipahis, was still held to be a worthy object of professional ambition. The regiment, in those days, was the officer’s home, whether in camp, or cantonment, or on the line of march. There was but little looking beyond; little hankering to leave it. To interest himself in the daily concerns of the Sipahis, to converse with them off parade, to enter into their feelings, to contribute to their comforts, were duties, the performance of which occupied his time, amused his mind, and yielded as much happiness to himself as it imparted to. others. There was, in truth, little to divert him from the business of his profession or to raise up a barrier between him and his men. Intercourse with Europe was rare and difficult. Neither the charms of English literature nor the attractions of English womanhood alienated his affections from the routine of military life, and made its details dull and dreary in his sight. He had subdued his habits, and very much his way of thinking, to the Orientalism by which he was surrounded. He was glad to welcome the native officer to his bungalow, to learn from him the news of the Lines and the gossip of the Bazaar, and to tell him, in turn, what were the chances of another campaign and to what new station the regiment was likely to be moved at the approaching annual Relief. If there were any complaints in the regiments, the grievance was stated with freedom on the one side, and listened to with interest on the other. If the men were right, there was a remedy; if they were wrong, there was an explanation. The Sipahi looked to his officer as to one who had both the power and the will to dispense ample justice to him. In every battalion, indeed, the men turned to their commandant as the depository of all their griefs, and the redresser of all their wrongs They called him their father, and he rejoiced to describe them as his “baba-log” – his babes.

Progress of Centralisation

But in time the power was taken from him, and with the power went also the will. A variety of deteriorating circumstances occurred – some the inevitable growth of British progress in the East, and some the results of ignorance, thoughtlessness, or miscalculation on the part of the governing body. The power of the English officer was curtailed and his influence declined. The command of a regiment had once been something more than a name. The commanding officer could promote his men, could punish

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his men, could dress them and discipline them as he pleased. The different battalions were called after the commander who had first led them to victory, and they rejoiced to be so distinguished. But, little by little, this power, by the absorbing action of progressive centralisation, was taken out of his hands; and he who, supreme in his own little circle, had been now a patriarch and now a despot, shrivelled into the mouthpiece of the Adjutant-General’s office and the instrument of Headquarters. The decisions of the commanding officer were appealed against, and frequently set aside. In the emphatic language of the East, he was made to eat dirt in the presence of his men. The Sipahi, then, ceased to look up to him as the centre of his hopes and fears, and the commanding officer lost much of the interest which he before took in his men, when he know how much their happiness and comfort depended upon his individual acts, and how the discipline and good conduct of the corps were the reflection of his personal efficiency.

England in India

And it happened that, about the same time, new objects of interest sprung up to render more complete the severance of the ties which had once bound the English officer to the native soldier. The second quarter of the nineteenth century in India was a period of progressive reform. We reformed our Government and we reformed ourselves. Increased facilities of intercourse with Europe gave a more European complexion to Society. English news, English books, above all, English gentlewomen, made their way freely and rapidly to India. The Overland Mail bringing news scarcely more than a month old of the last new European revolution; the book-club yielding its stores of light literature as fresh as is commonly obtained from circulating libraries at home; and an avatar of fair young English maidens, with the bloom of the Western summer on their cheeks, yielded attractions beside which the gossip of the lines and the feeble garrulity of the old Subahdar were very dreary and fatiguing. Little by little the Sipahi officer shook out the loose folds of his Orientalism. Many had been wont, in the absence of other female society, to solace themselves with the charms of a dusky mate, and to spend much time in the recesses of the .Liana. Bad as it was, when tried in the crucible of Christian ethics, it was not without its military advantages. The English officer, so mated, learnt to speak the languages of the country, and to understand the habits and feelings of the people; and he cherished a kindlier

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feeling for the native races than he would have done if no such alliances had been formed. But this custom passed away with the cause that produced it. The English wife displaced the native mistress. A new code of morals was recognised; and the Zenana was proscribed. With the appearance of the English gentlewoman in the military cantonment there grew up a host of new interests and new excitements, and the regiment became a bore.

Staff employment

Whilst these influences were sensibly weakening the attachment which had existed between the native soldier and his English officer, another deteriorating agent was at work with still more fatal effect. The Staff was carrying off all the best officers, and unsettling the rest. As the red line of British Empire extended itself around new provinces, and the administrative business of the State was thus largely increased, there was a demand for more workmen than the Civil Service could supply, and the military establishment of the Company was, therefore, indented upon for officers to fill the numerous civil and political posts thus opened out before them. Extensive surveys were to be conducted, great public works were to be executed, new irregular regiments were to be raised, and territories not made subject to the “regulations” were, for the most part, to be administered by military men. More lucrative, and held to be more honourable than common regimental duty, these appointments were eagerly coveted by the officers of the Company’s army. The temptation, indeed, was great. The means of marrying, of providing for a family, of securing a retreat to Europe before enfeebled by years or broken down by disease, were presented to the officer by this detached employment. And if these natural feelings were not paramount, there was the strong incentive of ambition or the purer desire to enter upon a career of more active utility. The number of officers with a regiment was thus reduced; but numbers are not strength, and still fewer might have sufficed, if they had been a chosen few. But of those who remained some lived in a state of restless expectancy, others were sunk in sullen despair. It was not easy to find a Sipahi officer, pure and simple, with no aspirations beyond his regiment, cheerful, content, indeed proud of his position. All that was gone. The officer ceased to rejoice in his work, and the men saw his heart was not with them.

There were some special circumstances, too, which at this

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time – during the administrations of Lord Amherst and Lord William Bentinck – tended to aggravate these deteriorating influences both upon the officers and the men of the Sipahi regiments. Since the subsidence of the spirit of disaffection, which had pervaded the Coast Army in 1806, there had been no obtrusive manifestations of discontent in the Sipahi’s mind. He had done his duty faithfully and gallantly in the great wars, which Lord Hastings had conducted to a triumphant issue; but, when peace came again, he again, after a while, began to take stock of his troubles and to listen to strange reports. One more illustration may be drawn from Madras, before the Bengal Army claims a monopoly of the record.

Muhammadan grievances

In the early spring of 1822, a paper was dropped in the Cavalry Lines of Arkat, setting forth that the followers of Muhammad, having been subjected to the power of the English, suffered great hardships – that, being so subjected, their prayers were not acceptable to the Almighty, and that, therefore, in great numbers they were dying of cholera morbus – that the curse of God was upon them; and that, therefore, it behoved them to make a great effort for the sake of their religion. There were countless Hindus and Musulmans between Arkat and Delhi. But the Europeans being few, it would be easy to slay the whole in one day. Let them but combine, and the result would be certain. There was no time, it said, to be lost. The English had taken all the Jaghirs and Inams of the people of the soil, and now they were about to deprive them of employment. A number of European regiments had been called for, and in the course of six months all the native battalions would be disbanded. Let, then, the senior Subahdar of each regiment instruct the other Subahdars, and let them instruct the Jamadars, and so on, till all the Sipahis were instructed, and the same being done at Vellur, at Chitin., at Madras, and other places, then, on a given signal, the whole should rise on one day. The day fixed was Sunday, the 17th of March. A Naik and ten Sipahis were to proceed at midnight to the house of each European, and kill him, without remorse, in his bed. This done, the regiments would be placed under the command of the native officers, and the Subahdars should have the pay of Colonels. It was always thus. It is always thus. A little for the Faith, and all for the Pocket.

From whomsoever this paper may have emanated, the attempt to corrupt the Sipahis was a failure. It was picked up in the

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Lines of the 6th Cavalry, and another nearly resembling it was dropped in the Lines of the 8th – but both were carried at once to the commanding officer of the station. Colonel Foulis took his measures with promptitude and vigour. He assembled the regimental commanders, imparted to them the contents of the paper, and desired them to place themselves in communication with the native officers whom they most trusted. Having done this, he wrote to the commandants of the several stations named in the paper. But they could see no signs of disaffection, and the appointed day passed by without even an audible murmur of discontent.

Sir Thomas Munro

But not many days afterwards, the Governor of Madras received by the post a letter in Hindustani, purporting to come from the principal native officers and Sipahis of the Army, setting forth the grievances under which they suffered as a body. The complaint was that all the wealth and all the honour went to the white Sirdars, especially to the civilians, whilst for the soldier there was nothing but labour and grief. “If we Sipahis take a country,” they said, “by the sword, these whore-son cowardly civil Sirdars enter that country and rule over it, and in a short time fill their coffers with money and go to Europe – but, if a Sipahi labour all his life, he is not five kaoris the better.” Under the Muhammadan Government it had been different, for, when victories were gained, Jaghirs were given to the soldiers, and high offices distributed among them. But, under the Company, everything was given to the Civil Service. “A single Collector’s peon has an authority and greatness in the country which cannot be expressed. But that peon does not fight like a Sipahi.” Such, in effect, was the plaint of the native soldiery, as conveyed to Governor Munro. It may have been the work of an individual, as might have been also the papers picked up in the lines of Arkat; but it is certain that both documents expressed sentiments which may be supposed at all times to lie embedded in the Sipahi mind, and which need. but little to bring them, fully developed, above the surface105.

The relations between the English officer and the native soldier were better then than they had been sixteen years before. But these relations were sadly weakened, and a heavy

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blow was given to the discipline and efficiency of the Indian army, when, two years later, the military establishment of the Three Presidencies were reorganised.

The Reorganisation

May 6, 1824

Then every regiment of two battalions became two separate regiments, and the officers attached to the original corps were told off alternately to its two parts – “all the odd or uneven numbers,” said the General Order, “to the first, and the even numbers to the second;” by which process it happened that a large number of officers were detached from the men with whom they had been associated throughout many years of active service. The evil of this was clearly seen at the time, and a feeble compromise was attempted. “It is not intended,” said the General Order, “that in carrying the present orders into effect, officers should be permanently removed from the particular battalion in which they may long have served and wished to remain, provided that by an interchange between officers standing the same number of removes from promotion, each could be retained in his particular battalion, and both are willing to make the exchange.” In effect, this amounted to little or nothing, and a large number of officers drifted away from the battalions in which they had been feared from boyhood, and strangers glided into their place.

The Burmese War

Bad as at any time must have been such a change as this, in its influence upon the morale of the Sipahi army, the evil was greatly enhanced by falling upon evil times. The best preservative, and the best restorative of military spirit and discipline, is commonly a good stirring war. But the Sipahi, though not unwilling to fight, was somewhat dainty and capricious about his fighting ground. A battle-field in Hindustan or the Dakhin was to his taste; but he was disquieted by the thought of serving in strange regions, of which he had heard only vague fables, beyond inaccessible mountain-ranges, or still more dreaded wildernesses of water. With the high-caste, fastidious Bengal Sipahi the war with Burmah was not, therefore, a popular war. The Madras Sipahi, more cosmopolitan and less nice, took readily to the transport vessel; and a large part of the native force was drawn from the Coast Army. But some Bengal regiments were also needed to take part in the operations of the war, and then the system began to fail us. To transport troops by sea from Calcutta to Rangun would have been an easy process.

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But the Bengal Sipahi had enlisted only for service in countries to which he could march; to take ship was not in his bond. The regiments, therefore, were marched to the frontier station of Chatgaon, and there assembled for the landward invasion of the Burmese country.

The Mutiny at Barrackpur

Without any apparent symptoms of discontent, some corps had already marched, when, in October, the incident occurred of which I am about to write, an incident which created a most powerful sensation from one end of India to the other, and tended greatly to impair the loyalty and discipline of the Bengal Sipahi. The 47th Regiment had been warned for foreign service, and was waiting at Barrackpur, a few miles from the Presidency, whilst preparations were being made for its march in the cold weather. To wait is often to repent. Inactive in cantonments during the rainy season, and in daily intercourse with the men of other regiments, who had been warned for the same service, the 47th, uninfluenced by any other external causes, would have lost any ardour which might have possessed them when first ordered to march against a barbarous enemy who had insulted their flag. But it happened that ominous tidings of disaster came to them from the theatre of war. The British troops had sustained a disaster at Ramu, the proportions of which had been grossly exaggerated in the recital, and it was believed that the Burmese, having cut up our battalions, or driven them into the sea, were sweeping on to the invasion of Bengal. The native newspapers bristled with alarming announcements of how the Commander-in-Chief had been killed in action and the Governor-General had poisoned himself in despair; and there was a belief throughout all the lower provinces of India that the rule of the Company was coming to an end. The fidelity of the Sipahi army requires the stimulus of continued success. Nothing tries it so fatally as disaster. When, therefore, news came that the war had opened with a great failure, humiliating to the British power, and all kinds of strange stories relating to the difficulties of the country to be traversed, the deadliness of the climate to be endured, and the prowess of the enemy to be encountered, forced their way into circulation in the Bazaars and in the Lines, the willingness which the Sipahis had once shown to take part in the operations beyond the frontier began to subside, and they were eager to find a pretext for refusing to march on such hazardous service.

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And, unhappily, one was soon found. There was a scarcity of available carriage-cattle for the movement of the troops. Neither bullocks nor drivers were to be hired, and fabulous prices were demanded. from purchasers for wretched starvelings not equal to a day’s journey. For the use of the regiments which had already marched, Bengal had been well-nigh swept out, and the reports which had since arrived rendered it difficult to persuade men voluntarily to accompany as camp-followers an expedition fraught with such peculiar perils. All the efforts of the Commissariat failed to obtain the required supply of cattle; and so the Sipahis were told to supply themselves. In this conjuncture, it would seem that a new lie was circulated through the Lines of Barrackpur. It was said that as the Bengal regiments could not, for want of cattle, be marched. to Chatgaon, they would be put on board ship and carried to Rangun across the Bay of Bengal. Murmurs of discontent then developed into oaths of resistance. The regiments warned for service in Burmah met in nightly conclave, and vowed not to cross the sea.

Still foremost in this movement, the 47th Regiment was commanded by Colonel Cartwright. Rightly measuring the difficulty, and moved with compassion for the Sipahi, who really had just ground for complaint, he offered to provide cattle from his private funds; and all the refuse animals, either too old or too young for service, were got together, and the Government offered to advance money for their purchase. But the terrible ban of “Too Late” was written across these conciliatory measures. The regiment was already tainted with the ineradicable virus of mutiny, which soon broke out on parade. The Sipahis declared that they would not proceed to Burmah by sea, and that they would not march unless they were guaranteed the increased allowances known in the jargon of the East as “double batta.” This was on the 30th of October. On the 1st of November, another parade was summoned. The behaviour of the Sipahis was worse than before – violent, outrageous, not to be forgiven; and they remained masters of the situation throughout both the day and night. Then the Commander-in-Chief appeared on the scene. A hard, strict disciplinarian, with no knowledge of the native army, and a bitter prejudice against it, Sir Edward Paget was a man of the very metal to tread down insurrection with an iron heel, regardless both of causes and of consequences. He carried

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with him to Barrackpur two European regiments, a battery of European artillery, and a troop of the Governor-General’s Body-guard. Next morning the native regiments found themselves in the presence of the English troops; but still they did not know the peril that awaited them, and, with a childlike obstinacy, they were not to be moved from their purpose of resistance. Some attempt was made at explanation – some attempt at conciliation. But it was feeble and ineffectual; perhaps not understood. They were told, then, that they must consent to march, or to ground their arms. Still not seeing the danger, for they were not told that the artillery guns were loaded with grape, and the gunners ready to fire106, they refused to obey the word; and so the signal for slaughter was given. The guns opened upon them. The mutineers were soon in panic flight. Throwing away their arms and accoutrements, they made for the river. Some were shot down; some were drowned. There was no attempt at battle. None had been contemplated. The muskets with which the ground was strewn were found to be unloaded.

Then the formalities of the military law were called in to aid the stern decisions of the grape-shot. Some of the leading mutineers were convicted, and hanged; and the regiment was struck out of the Army List. But this display of vigour, though it checked mutiny for the time, tended only to sow broadcast the seeds of future insubordinations. It created a bad moral effect throughout the whole of the Bengal army. From Bazaar to Bazaar the news of the massacre ran with a speed almost telegraphic. The regiments, which had already marched to the frontier, were discussing the evil tidings with mingled dismay and disgust before the intelligence, sent by special express, had reached the ears of the British chiefs. “They are your own men whom you have been destroying,” said an old native officer; and he could not trust himself to say more107.

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The Bengal regiments, with the expeditionary force, had soon a grievance of their own, and the remembrance of this dark tragedy increased the bitterness with which they discussed it. The high-caste men were writhing under an order which, on the occupation of Arakan, condemned the whole body of the soldiery to work, as labourers, in the construction of their barracks and lines. The English soldier fell to with a will; the Madras Sipahi cheerfully followed his example. But the Bengal soldier asked if Brahmans and Rajputs were to be treated like and, for a while, there was an apprehension that it might become necessary to make another terrible example after the Barrackpur pattern. But this was fortunately averted. General Morrison called a parade, and addressed the recusants. The speech, sensible and to the point, was translated by Captain Phillips; and so admirable was his free rendering of it, so perfect the manner in which he clothed it with familiar language, making every word carry a meaning, every sentence strike some chord .of sympathy in the Sipahi’s breast, that when he had done, the high-caste Hindustanis looked at each other, understood what they read in their comrades’ faces, and forthwith stripped to their work.

Thus was an incipient mutiny checked by a few telling words. And the sad event which had gone before might have been averted also if there had been as much tact and address as “promptitude and decision.” A few sentences of well-chosen, well-delivered Hindustani, on that fatal November morning, might have brought the Sipahis back to reason and to loyalty108. But they had the benefit of neither wise counsel from within nor kindly exhortation from without. Deprived, by the reconstruction of the Army, of the officers whom they had long known and trusted, they were more than ever in need of external aid to bring them back to a right state of feeling-. They wanted a

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General of Division, such as Malcolm or Ochterlony, to reawaken their soldierly instincts – their pride in their colours, their loyalty to their Salt. But, instead of such judicious treatment as would have shown them their own folly, as in a glass, the martinets of the Horse Guards, stern in their un sympathising ignorance, their ruthless prejudices, had, in our own territories, at the very seat of government, in the presence of no pressing danger, no other lessons to teach, no other remedies to apply, than those which were to be administered at the bayonet’s point and the cannon’s mouth109.

The Half-Batta Order

With the return of peace came new disquietudes. A reign of Retrenchment commenced. Alarmed by the expenses of their military establishments, the Company sent out imperative orders for their reduction – orders more than once issued before, more than once disobeyed. Blows of this kind commonly fall upon the weakest – upon those least able to endure them. So it. happened that the condition of the regimental officer having, by a variety of antecedent circumstances, been shorn of well-nigh all its advantages, was rendered still more grievous and intolerable by the curtailment of his pecuniary allowances. An order, known in military history as the Half-Batta Order, was passed, by which all officers stationed within a certain distance from the Presidency were deprived of a large percentage of their pay110. The order excited the utmost dismay throughout the Army; but the discontent which it engendered vented itself in words. Twice before the officers of the Company’s army had resented similar encroachments, and had been prepared to strike in defence of their asserted rights. But this last blow did not rouse them to rebellion. Never before had justice and reason been so clearly upon their side; but, keenly as they felt their wrongs, they did

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not threaten the Government they served, but loyally protested against the treatment to which they had been subjected. The humours of which their memorials could not wholly relieve them, a Press, virtually free, carried off like a great conduit. The excitement expended itself in newspaper paragraphs, and gradually subsided. But it left behind it an after-growth of unanticipated evils. The little zeal that was left in the regimental officer was thus crushed out of him, and the Sipahi, who had watched the decline, little by little, of the power once vested in the English captain, now saw him injured and humiliated by his Government, without any power of resistance; saw that he was no longer under the special protection of the State, and so lost all respect for an instrument so feeble and so despised.

Abolition of Corporal Punishment

And as though it were a laudable achievement thus to divest the native soldier of all fear of his European officer, another order went forth during the same interval of peace, abolishing the punishment of the lash throughout the Sipahi army in India. So little was he a drunkard and a ruffian, that it was a rare spectacle to see a black soldier writhing under the drummer’s cat. But when the penalty, though still retained in the European army, became illegal and impossible among them, the native soldiery felt that another blow was struck at military authority – another tie of restraint unloosed. It was looked upon less as a boon than as a concession – less as the growth of our humanity than of our fear. So the Sipahi did not love us better, but held us a little more in contempt.

There were great diversities of sentiment upon this point, and some, whose opinions were entitled to respect, believed in the wisdom of the measure. But the weight of authority was against it111, and, some ten years afterwards, Hardinge revived

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what Bentinck had abolished. But even before the act of abolition, by a variety of concurrent causes, the character and the conduct of the Sipahi Army were so impaired, that an officer who had served long with them, and knew them well, declared, in his evidence before a Committee of Parliament, that “in all the higher qualifications of soldiers, in devotedness to the service, readiness for any duty they may be called upon to perform, cheerfulness under privations, confidence and attachment to their officers, unhesitating and uncalculating bravery in the field, without regard either to the number or the character of the enemy, the native soldier is allowed by all the best-informed officers of the service, by those who have most experience, and are best acquainted with their character, to have infinitely deteriorated112.”

Footnotes

103. This was a part only of the civil privileges enjoyed by the native soldier. Sir .Jasper Nicolls, in his evidence before the Parliamentary Committee of 1832, said that the withdrawal of these privileges had been regarded as an especial grievance by the Sipahis – but I have failed to discover that they ever were withdrawn. [Note by Editor. – They were withdrawn from the regulation provinces, but not from Oudh, the home of the great majority of the Sipahis, until after the annexation of that country by the British. It was this very withdrawal that tended greatly to incense the Sipahis against their masters. – G. B. M.]

104. There had certainly been, before the mutiny in Southern India, a very culpable want of kindly consideration on the part of our English officers fur the native officers and men of the Sipahi army. In the letter, written by the Chairman and Deputy-Chairman of the East India Company, to Mr. Dundas, referred to above. this is alleged to have been one of the remote causes of the mutiny. It is stated that the English had ceased to offer chairs to their native officers when visited by them. A favourable reaction, however, seems afterwards to have set in.

105. It was to this event that Sir Thomas Munro alluded in his remarkable minute on the dangers of a Free Press in India.

106. It is doubtful, indeed, whether they knew that the guns were in the rear of the European regiments. [The account of this mutiny might have been written by one of the mutinous Sipahis. In point of fact, all means were exhausted before force was resorted to. The Sipahis knew thoroughly well their position, and they counted on the weakness and forbearance of their masters. But for the prompt action of Sir Edward Paget the whole army would have revolted. – G. B. M.]

107. “Political Incidents of the first Burmese War.” By T. C. Robertson, to whom was entrusted the political conduct of the war. [I can only affirm that the crushing of the mutiny had the effect exactly contrary to that here recorded. It crushed the incipient feeling of disobedience which would otherwise have led to the worst results. None more rejoiced at it, none more admitted its justice, than the loyal Sipahis. – G. B. M.]

108. [When one recollects how many sentences of “well-chosen, well-delivered Hindustani,” were used in vain in 1857, one marvels the more at this condemnation of the one remedy which proved successful in 1825. Mutiny can never be crushed out by smooth words. The soul that will not nerve itself to have recourse to heroic measures will never successfully cope with revolt. – G. B. M.]

109. [In 1857, the Sipahis had generals of division like Hearsey, who knew them well, who spoke their language as well as they did, and who did all in his power “to awaken their soldierly instincts, their pride in their colours, their loyalty to their Salt.” The result was general mutiny. And the same result would have followed the application of a similar remedy in 1825. I ask the intelligent reader to compare the two circumstances-1825 and 1857: the two remedies: the two results: and to draw his own conclusions. – G. B. M.]

110. Or, in strict professional language, his allowances. The gross salary of an Indian officer was known as his “pay and allowances.” The former, which was small, was enhanced by several substantial accessories, as tentage, house-rent, and batta, or field allowance.

111. Numerous illustrations might be cited, but none more significant than the following anecdote, told by Mr. Charles Raikes: “I recollect a conversation which I had in 1839 with an old pensioned Subahdar. I inquired of him how the measure would work. He replied, that the abolition of the punishment would induce some classes to enter the Army who had not done so before. ‘But, Sahib,’ said the old man, Fauj be-dar hogya.’ (The Army has ceased to fear.)” Another native officer said: “The English, to manage us rightly, should hold the whip in one hand and the mehtais (sweetmeats) in the other. You have dropped the whip, and now hold out sweets to us in both hands.” [On this I cannot help remarking that if the Army had ceased to fear, and that cessation of corporal punishment had caused it to deteriorate, no appeals to its loyalty in words of well-chosen Hindustani, spoken even by “a Malcolm or an Ochterlony,” would have remedied the evil. – G.B.M.]

112. Evidence of Captain Macan in 1832.

This collection transcribed by Chris Gage
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