The Insecurity State [Hardcover ed.] 1108418317, 9781108418317

Citation preview

The Insecurity State

In this provocative new work, Mark Condos explores the ‘dark underside’ of the ideologies that sustained British rule in India. Using Punjab as a case study, he argues that India’s colonial overlords were obsessively fearful, and plagued by an unreasoning belief in their own vulnerability as rulers. These enduring anxieties precipitated, and justified, an all too frequent recourse to violence, joined with an insistence on untrammelled power placed in the hands of the executive. Examining how the British colonial experience was shaped by a chronic sense of unease, anxiety, and insecurity, this is a timely intervention in debates about the contested project of colonial state-building, the oppressive and violent practices of colonial rule, the nature of imperial sovereignty, law, and policing and the postcolonial legacies of empire. Mark Condos obtained both his BA and MA at Queen’s University in Canada. In 2013, he received his PhD from the University of Cambridge, where he worked under the supervision of the late Professor Sir Christopher Bayly. In 2014, Dr Condos was awarded a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellowship at Queen Mary University of London. His current research examines how different forms of legal and extrajudicial violence were incorporated by the British and French empires in their attempts to police different frontier regions during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia 4843/24, 2nd Floor, Ansari Road, Daryaganj, Delhi – 110002, India 79 Anson Road, #06-04/06, Singapore 079906 Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108418317 DOI: 10.1017/9781108289740 © Mark Condos 2017 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2017 Printed in the United Kingdom by Clays, St Ives plc A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-1-108-41831-7 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Contents

List of Figures page vii Acknowledgements ix Abbreviations and a Note on Style xi Introduction: Fear, Panic, and the Violence of Empire

2

1 Colonial Insecurity in Early British India, 1757–1857

25

2 Re-Assessing the ‘Garrison State’: Pacification and Colonial Disquiet in Punjab

67

3 Law, the Punjab School, and the ‘Kooka Outbreak’ of 1872

103

4 Frontier Terror and the Murderous Outrages Act of 1867

140

5 Imperial Recruiting and Imperial Anxieties, 1870–1920

181

Conclusion: Colonial Vulnerability and the Insecurity of Empire

217

Epilogue: The Insecurity State Today

231

Bibliography 235 Index 255

v

Figures

0.1 Map of Punjab

page 1

1.1 James Andrew Broun Ramsay, 1st Marquess of Dalhousie. Portrait by Sir John Watson-Gordon, 1847. © National Portrait Gallery, London.

37

2.1 Maharajah Ranjit Singh. © The British Library Board, Add.27254, f.176v.

73

3.1 Sir John Lawrence, as Viceroy of India (author’s own collection). 114 3.2 Sir James Fitzjames Stephen. Portrait by Lock and Whitfield, 1882. © National Portrait Gallery, London.

120

3.3 The Assassination of Lord Mayo. Illustration from James Grant, Cassell’s Illustrated History of India (London: Cassell, Petter & Galpin, 1880), vol. 2 (author’s own collection).

125

4.1 Map of the North-West Frontier, c. 1901

143

4.2 The Supreme Indian Council. Portrait by Bourne and Shepard, c. 1864. © National Portrait Gallery, London.

155

4.3 ‘Execution of a Ghazi, or Mohammedan Fanatic, at the Peshawur Gate, Jellalabad’, The London Illustrated News, 8 February 1879 (author’s own collection).

159

vii

viii Figures

5.1 ‘Unrest in Bengal’, Black & White, 13 July 1907 (author’s own collection).

200

5.2 Sir Michael Francis O’Dwyer. Portrait by Walter Stoneman, 1920. © National Portrait Gallery, London.

209

Acknowledgements

This book would not have been possible without the assistance and ­support of numerous individuals and institutions. Like most first books, this one began as a doctoral thesis, and so my first and greatest debt is to my late supervisor at Cambridge, Chris Bayly. Chris’ boundless encouragement, enthusiasm, kindness, and intellectual acuity have become the stuff of legend, but, in this case, the truth has lost none of its temper. Chris’ sudden passing in April of 2015 was a great blow to everyone who had the pleasure of knowing or working with him, and he has been sorely missed. If he had been around to see the completion of this book, I hope he would have found something provocative in it to discuss over a glass of red at the pub. My next greatest debt lies with the irrepressible Kim Wagner. Over the last three years, Kim has been a constant source of support, debate, and unsolicited fashion advice. Many of the ideas and arguments contained in the pages of this book have been inspired by our innumerable conversations and discussions, and so I cannot thank him enough. My work has also benefited tremendously from a motley assortment of friends and colleagues from the UK, India, Pakistan, and around the world. As such, I would like to thank (in no particular order): Jon Wilson, Tim Harper, Guillemette Crouzet, Bérénice Guyot-Réchard, Jesús CháirezGarza, Devyani Gupta, Faridah Zaman, Gui-Xi   Young, Christian Schläpfer, Patrick Clibbens, Michael Vann, Tahir Kamran, Mishka Sinha, Jonathan Saha, and Amir Khan. Reeju Ray was an excellent guide and host during my first trip to Delhi in early 2011, and I have many fond memories from that visit. Ammar Jan was an equally superb host during my more recent time spent in Lahore, and I am extremely grateful to him, Tabby Spence, and all their Lahori friends for introducing me to that wonderful and resilient city. Over the last three years, I have also been quite fortunate to have been part of the dynamic and (refreshingly) collegial School of History at Queen Mary University of London. I consider myself particularly fortunate to have been supported there by Miri Rubin, Colin Jones, Julian Jackson, and Saul Dubow. Special thanks are ix

x Acknowledgements

reserved for those friends and colleagues who have read and c­ ommented on earlier drafts of this book. Elisabeth Leake, Chris Moffat, and Michael Mann all lent me their discerning eyes throughout this process. I would also like to extend my particular gratitude and recognition to Derek Elliott, who not only provided invaluable feedback throughout the course of this project, but has also been an endless source of intellectual debate, friendship, and humour over the past several years. It goes without saying that all the mistakes that remain in this book are mine alone. My research has been funded by the generous financial support of a number of organizations, including the Leverhulme Trust; the Cambridge Commonwealth and Overseas Trusts; Wolfson College, Cambridge; and the Royal Historical Society. I am also indebted to the Smuts Memorial Fund, the Prince Consort Award, and the Cambridge-India Partnership Fund for supporting my archival fieldwork in India. Warm thanks are extended the staff at the British Library, the National Archives of India, the Punjab State Archives, the National Archives at Kew, and the Rare Books and Commonwealth reading rooms at the Cambridge University Library for all their efforts expended on my behalf. I am also grateful to Marian Barry for very graciously allowing me access to her private collection of antiquarian books. I would like to express my special appreciation to the staff at the Cambridge Centre for South Asian Studies, especially Barb Roe and Kevin Greenbank, for the invaluable assistance and support they have given me over the years. Lucy Rhymer, the two anonymous reviewers, and the staff at Cambridge University Press have also made the production of this book a (surprisingly) painless and pleasurable affair. Finally, I would like to express my very special gratitude to my parents and PL. Without their unfaltering encouragement and support, none of this would have ever been possible, and it is to them that I humbly dedicate this book.

Abbreviations and a Note on Style

BL British Library (London) CINC Commander-in-Chief DOI Defence of India (Act) EIC East India Company GG Governor-General GOI Government of India IOR India Office Records (British Library) MOA Murderous Outrages Act Mss Eur European Manuscripts (India Office Records, British Library) NA National Archives (Kew, London) NAI National Archives of India (New Delhi) NWF North-West Frontier NWFP North-West Frontier Province PAR Punjab Administration Report PG Punjab Government PP Parliamentary Papers PSA Punjab State Archives (Chandigarh) SSG Straits Settlements Government The appearance of italics in this book indicate the titles of major works, the use of non-English words, and those instances where there is a direct quotation from a text where the original author underlined or italicized words to add emphasis. To minimize confusion, I have tried to retain the standard spellings of place names that were used during the historical period covered by this study, as opposed to their modern-day equivalents (e.g. ‘Madras’ instead of ‘Chennai’). The one major exception to this is that I have dropped the additional ‘the’ article when referring to Punjab, except when making direct quotations. This use of ‘Punjab’ as opposed to ‘the Punjab’ is part of a contemporary rhetorical project that seeks to move away from dated, colonial terminology. With regards to the names of individuals and groups, I have used the transcriptions which were most commonly used in the British records consulted. xi

Figure 0.1  Map of Punjab

1

Introduction: Fear, Panic, and the Violence of Empire

We cannot be very brave unless we be possessed of a greater fear. Brigadier-General Reginald E. Dyer, 25 August 19191

0.1

Colonial Terror in Punjab

On the afternoon of 13 April 1919, a detachment of Indian Army soldiers opened fire on an unarmed crowd that had gathered in a confined public space known as the Jallianwala Bagh in the Punjabi holy city of Amritsar. No warning was given prior to the commencement of the shooting. Many of those who were not either killed or wounded by the rifle fire were injured or trampled to death during the ensuing struggle to escape through the few narrow exits that led out of the Bagh. Some desperately sought refuge from the firing by jumping into a nearby well, only to end up drowning. A few lucky individuals were able to take cover behind the walls of the well and a small tomb. The firing continued for nearly 10 minutes, and was personally directed by the commanding officer, Brigadier-General Reginald E. Dyer. By the time Dyer gave the order to cease firing, his troops had expended around 1,650 rounds of ammunition, and heaps of bodies lay strewn throughout the Bagh. Dyer and his men then promptly marched off, leaving the wounded and dying to fend for themselves. Though accounts differ as to the precise number of civilians who were killed and injured during the shooting, the official numbers given by the Government of India (GOI) were 379 killed, and 1,200 wounded.2 In many ways, this frightful event could be read as the ultimate expression of colonial power. Indeed, what could be more evocative of the

 Qtd in Nigel Collett, The Butcher of Amritsar: Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer (London: Continuum, 2006), p. 423. 2  Report of the Committee Appointed by the Government of India to Investigate the Disturbances in the Punjab, etc. (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1920), p. 29 [hereafter Hunter Committee Report]. 1

2

Colonial Terror in Punjab3

brute strength of colonial domination than the ability to inflict such a devastating and indiscriminate slaughter upon its own subjects? On the other hand, however, this raises the question of why such a powerful state would feel the need to demonstrate its authority in this manner. If British rule really was so absolute and unassailable, then why was it necessary to proclaim this through such a spectacular display of violence? In this book I would like to argue that British colonial rule in India was actually a fundamentally anxious and insecure endeavour, and that brute displays of power, like the one described above, were actually manifestations of colonial weakness and vulnerability, rather than strength. The idea that a colonial state capable of inflicting such shocking degrees of violence could ever be considered ‘vulnerable’ or ‘weak’, or that the behaviour of British officials, like Dyer, could have been largely determined by fear and panic may seem deliberately provocative. The very suggestion that imperial overlords could ever be viewed as vulnerable, or even ‘helpless’ in some situations, is deeply unsettling because empires ultimately represented power and dominance, and were often remarkably durable even during times of crisis.3 Nevertheless, it is the central premise of this book that we cannot comprehend fully the violent and authoritarian tendencies of colonialism without a better understanding of how the British experience in India was mediated by an enduring and pervasive sense of anxiety, insecurity, and fear. Today, the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre (also known as the Amritsar Massacre) is remembered as one of the most brutal and evil acts perpetrated under British colonial rule.4 For many it was the moment when whatever shred of moral credibility the British Empire still possessed was lost. As the Labour politician Colonel Josiah Wedgwood so despairingly put it in Parliament, ‘it has destroyed our reputation throughout the world’.5 In addition to drawing unfavourable comparisons to the sorts of ‘Prussian atrocities’ committed during the recent war, Dyer’s indiscriminate shooting provided an awkward and unwelcome reminder of both the ongoing conflict and repression in Ireland and the recent revolution  Maurus Reinkowski and Gregor Thum, ‘Helpless Imperialists: Introduction’, in Maurus Reinkowski and Gregor Thum (eds.), Helpless Imperialists: Imperial Failure, Fear, and Radicalization (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013), pp. 7–8. 4  Derek Sayer, ‘British Reactions to the Amritsar Massacre 1919–1920’, Past & Present, 131:1 (May 1991): pp. 130–64. 5  ‘You know what will happen’, he continued. ‘All the blackguards in America when they lynch niggers, they will say, “Oh, you did the same in India”. When butcheries take place in Russia, whether it be by White or Red Guard, they will, “We never did anything like what you did in India”; and when we tell the Turks, “You massacred the Armenians”, they will say, “Yes, we wish we had the chance of getting 5,000 of them together, and then of shooting straight”’: Hansard HC Deb. 22 December 1919, vol. 123, col. 1232. 3

4

Introduction: Fear, Panic, and the Violence of Empire

in Egypt.6 The massacre was also a watershed moment for the Indian nationalist movement. Moderates, who had previously sought to work with the British in order to bring about gradual changes and reforms from within the colonial system, now began to call for complete independence, and M.K. Gandhi used the public outrage over the massacre to help launch the 1920–2 Non-Cooperation Movement.7 Yet nearly a century later, the sheer scale and brutality of the massacre is still difficult to fully comprehend, and debate has raged over how best to explain and interpret Dyer’s actions at Jallianwala Bagh.8 Some studies have emphasised the individual responsibility of Dyer and sought to understand this tragedy as the excessive response of one man.9 More compelling approaches, however, have attempted to understand and situate the massacre within the structural conditions of British colonial rule in India more generally.10 Nasser Hussain, for instance, has explored how the decision taken by Dyer was reflective of a wider tension between colonial conceptions of sovereignty and the rule of law, while Taylor Sherman has revealed how Dyer’s actions were an example of an informal, yet systemic culture of colonial policing and punishment that operated across India.11 More recently, Kim A. Wagner has persuasively demonstrated that Dyer’s response was determined in large part

 Hansard, HC Deb. 23 February 1920, vol. 125, cols. 1339–455.  Bipan Chandra et al., India’s Struggle for Independence, 1857–1947 (New Delhi: Penguin, 1989), chap. 15. 8  For a good summary of these debates, see Kim A. Wagner, ‘“Calculated to Strike Terror”: The Amritsar Massacre and the Spectacle of Colonial Violence’, Past & Present, 233:1 (November 2016): pp. 185–225. 9  Shortly after the massacre, Winston Churchill famously claimed that, ‘It is an extraordinary event, a monstrous event, an event which stands in singular and sinister isolation’: Hansard HC Deb. 8 July 1920, vol. 131, col. 1725. As Purnima Bose and Laura Lyons have pointed out, by emphasising the excesses of individual officers and using them scapegoats, both the colonial regime and the wider imperial establishment were essentially able to disavow their own responsibility for the violence: Purnima Bose and Laura Lyons, ‘Dyer Consequences: The Trope of Amritsar, Ireland, and the Lessons of the “Minimum” Force Debate’, boundary 2, 26:2 (1999), p. 202. Nigel Collett’s biography of Dyer is an example of this sort approach: Collett, The Butcher of Amritsar. 10  Helen Fein has argued that ‘race’ and ‘class’ were the dominant categories that conditioned the violent colonial response to dissidence, while Derek Sayer has more recently argued that it was colonial paternalism and the rendering of Indians as ‘naughty children’ who needed to be taught a lesson that allowed Dyer to justify his actions: Helen Fein, Imperial Crime and Punishment: The Massacre at Jallianwala Bagh and British Judgment, 1919–1920 (Honolulu: The University of Hawaii Press, 1977); Sayer, ‘British Reactions to the Amritsar Massacre’. 11  See, respectively, Nasser Hussain, The Jurisprudence of Emergency: Colonialism and the Rule of Law (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003); Taylor C. Sherman, State Violence and Punishment in India (New York: Routledge, 2009). 6 7

Colonial Terror in Punjab5

by the traumatic memory of the so-called Indian ‘Mutiny’ of 1857.12 According to Wagner, enduring narratives of British victimhood and vulnerability during the ‘Mutiny’ gave rise to a ‘colonial culture of fear’ in which the memory or spectre of 1857 served as a powerful shorthand or ‘motif’ that could be invoked again and again by colonial officers as a way of ­justifying their often harsh, authoritarian measures in order to preserve the safety and security of Britons in India.13 As Dyer himself later explained, he saw the crowd at Jallianwala Bagh not as an unarmed mob, but as ‘a rebel army’ that threatened the lives of every European in the city and the very security and stability of the Raj itself.14 While there is little to suggest that Dyer’s apocalyptic assessment of the situation was anything other than a hyberbolic overreaction, it is clear that many other colonial officials also believed that the situation in Amritsar and elsewhere throughout Punjab during the spring of 1919 presented a very real and critical threat to British rule in India. Prior to the massacre, the province had been rocked by widespread agitation against the GOI’s highly controversial decision to indefinitely extend certain emergency powers that had been granted to it during the First World War under the auspices of what became known as the Rowlatt Act.15  The nomenclature used to describe the events of 1857 has a fraught and highly politicised history. While the British referred to it as ‘the Mutiny’, the Indian nationalist writer V.D. Savarkar maintained that it was an ‘Indian War of Independence’: V.D. Savarkar, The Indian War of Independence (London: s.n., 1909). Various other terms, including ‘rebellion’, ‘revolt’, and ‘uprising’ have subsequently been adopted to describe the events of 1857. For a summary of some of the salient shifts in these various representations, see Clare Anderson, The Indian Uprising of 1857–8: Prisons, Prisoners and Rebellion (London: Anthem Press, 2007), p. 1; Kim A. Wagner, ‘The Marginal Mutiny: The New Historiography of the Indian Uprising of 1857’, History Compass, 9:10 (October 2011): pp. 760–6. 13   See Kim A. Wagner, ‘“Treading Upon Fires”: The “Mutiny”-Motif and Colonial Anxieties in British India’, Past & Present, 218:1 (February 2013): pp. 159–97; Wagner, ‘Calculated to Strike Terror’. 14  ‘I had, in fact, the rebel army in front of me. I knew, so far as human foresight could go, that if I shirked its challenge and did not then and there crush it, . . . there would infallibly follow that night or next morning a general mob movement both from inside and outside Amritsar which would have destroyed all the European population, including women and children and all my troops, and involved in its ruin the law-abiding Indian population as well’: PP, 1920 (Cmd. 771) XXXIV.677, Statement by Brig.-General R.E. Dyer, C.B. (Punjab Disturbances), p. 12. In his earlier testimony to the Hunter Committee, there were several occasions where Dyer explicitly referred to the ‘mutiny’: Testimony of Dyer before the Hunter Committee, Disorders Inquiry (Hunter) Committee 1919–20: Evidence vol. III: Amritsar (Calcutta: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1920), p. 137. 15  The Rowlatt Act gave the colonial state wide powers to help curb revolutionary activity in India, including the right to imprison individuals suspected of terrorism without trial, the abolition of juries in cases of alleged sedition, and the withdrawal of the right of appeal. It was named after Justice Sidney Rowlatt, the president of the Sedition Committee that was convened in early 1918 to examine ‘the nature and extent of the 12

6

Introduction: Fear, Panic, and the Violence of Empire

Thousands of Punjabis flocked to protest the new law, and a series of hartals (strikes) across the province’s major cities and urban areas had quickly brought the province to its knees. On 10 April, these protests turned violent after police fired upon and killed several demonstrators in Amritsar. In retaliation, incensed mobs killed five Europeans; assaulted a female missionary; set fire to banks, churches, and the town hall; and attacked the telegraph office.16 Lieutenant-Governor Michael O’Dwyer, who remained one of Dyer’s most ardent and loyal supporters to the end, later testified to the Hunter Committee that was charged with investigating the massacre that he had ‘no hesitation in saying that General Dyer’s action that day was the decisive factor in crushing the rebellion, the seriousness of which is only now being generally realised’.17 Dyer’s actions, of course, did not put an end to the disturbances, and the brutal violence he inflicted was also not the last time during the crisis when colonial authorities resorted to spectacular forms of punishment in a desperate attempt to restore order and some semblance of British control. On 14 April, the day after the tragic events at Amritsar, violent riots broke out in Gujranwala. Finding no troops available to help restore order, O’Dwyer despatched Royal Air Force aircraft to subdue the crowds from the air using bombs and machine guns.18 Meanwhile, Indian rioters in the countryside continued to attack railway stations and destroy telegraph lines, and armed police were called upon to disperse violent protests in Lahore and Lyallpur.19 criminal conspiracies connected with the revolutionary movement in India’. It was the recommendation of this committee that led to the promulgation of the law: Report of the Sedition Committee, 1918 (Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1918). In the words of B.G. Horniman, the editor of the Bombay Chronicle and a strong supporter of the Indian nationalist movement, the Rowlatt Act deprived people ‘of their most elementary human rights and [was] unparalleled in the laws of any modern civilised State’: B.G. Horniman, Amritsar and Our Duty to India (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1920), p. 49. 16  Punjab Disturbances, April 1919: Compiled from the Civil and Military Gazette, 2nd ed. (Lahore: The Civil and Military Gazette Press, 1919), p. 9. This pamphlet was compiled from the daily reports on the Punjab Disturbances that appeared in the Civil and Military Gazette. It proved so popular that it entered a second round of printing by May of 1919. 17  Hunter Committee Report, p. 31. While the Hunter Committee ultimately condemned Dyer and his actions at Amritsar and rejected the claim by O’Dwyer and others that the disturbances were the result of a pre-mediated and coordinated conspiracy, they conceded that they did constitute an ‘open rebellion’ against British rule that had justified the imposition of martial law. According to them, ‘a movement which had started in rioting and become a rebellion might have rapidly developed into a revolution, and it would have been dangerous and irresponsible of the Punjab authorities not to act as they did’: ibid., p. 63. Many others, including those back in Britain, actually praised him as the ‘saviour of the Punjab’: Sayer, ‘British Reactions to the Amritsar Massacre’, pp. 132, 158. 18  Punjab Disturbances, pp. 17, 38. 19  Hunter Committee Report, pp. 147–8.

Colonial Terror in Punjab7

With his resources stretched to the limit and unable to regain control over what he repeatedly referred to as an open ‘rebellion’ against British rule, O’Dwyer finally declared martial law on 15 April.20 Martial law remained in operation for nearly two months, during which time military authorities arrested and convicted hundreds of individuals implicated in the protests, instituted public ­floggings, and inflicted various other improvised, abusive, and humiliating punishments designed to denigrate Indians.21 In the wake of the disturbances, the GOI praised O’Dwyer and the Punjab Government for their prompt and decisive response to the crisis. In their opinion, O’Dwyer had acted ‘with decision and vigour in a time of great danger’ and quelled ‘a dangerous rising which might have had widespread and disastrous effects on the rest of India’.22 Several years later, O’Dwyer also defended his administration’s handling of the disturbances, praising the courage, steadiness, and discipline of the British officers and soldiers who had helped restore order throughout the province.23 Despite this glowing outpouring of colonial self-congratulation, contemporary Indian observers came to a very different conclusion about the British handling of the disturbances. The Minority Report endorsed by the Indian members of the Hunter Committee was deeply critical of the government, arguing that both the initial declaration of ­martial law and its prolonged duration had been entirely unjustifiable.24 A ­separate  Michael O’Dwyer, India as I Knew It, 1885–1925 (London: Constable, 1925), p. 298. Martial law was initially proclaimed in Amritsar, Lahore, and Gujranwala, but was later extended to Gujrat and Lyallpur. It remained in operation until June, by which time O’Dwyer was satisfied that the ‘rebellion’ had been quelled. 21  The most notorious of these was Dyer’s so-called ‘crawling order’ that forced Indians to crawl on their hands and knees through the street where Miss Sherwood, a British missionary, had been attacked in Amritsar: see, Hunter Committee Report, pp. 83–5. Lieutenant-Colonel Frank Johnson also earned an infamous reputation for himself during his administration martial law in Lahore. As Horniman put it, ‘He showed not only an intensity but a malignant efficiency in devising means for the terrorisation of the population’: Horniman, Amritsar and Our Duty to India, p. 132. 22  ‘Reviewing the situation as a whole’, they continued, ‘we desire to express our great appreciation of the admirable conduct of the troops who were employed in the ­suppression of the outbreak. Leaving aside individual instances, which have already been noticed, both officers and men acted with admirable restraint under most trying circumstances and the Government of India have nothing but praise and gratitude for the services which they rendered in suppressing disorder and restoring peace of the country’: GOI to Montagu, 3 May 1920, PP, 1920 (705) XXXIV.649, Correspondence Between the Government of India and the Secretary of State for India on the Report of Lord Hunter’s Committee, no. 1, pp. 20–1. 23  O’Dwyer, India as I Knew It, chap. 17. 24  As they dryly put it, ‘we cannot avoid the impression that the Punjab Government rather easily persuaded themselves that the introduction of martial law was necessary’: Hunter Committee Report, p. 106. 20

8

Introduction: Fear, Panic, and the Violence of Empire

inquiry conducted by the Indian National Congress (INC) was even more damning in its criticism, claiming that the entire British response to the disturbances had been an overreaction from the start, caused by anxious and ‘panicky’ leaders who had needlessly escalated events through their own heavy-handedness.25 Shortly after the publication of the Congress report, Pearay Mohan, the assistant editor of the Lahorebased ­newspaper, The Tribune, published a sensational and incendiary book, provocatively entitled An Imaginary Rebellion and How it was Suppressed.26 In it, he excoriated the British colonial state for its tendency to ‘invent’ enemies and crises as a pretence for the expansion of draconian state powers, like the Rowlatt Act. The danger of these types of laws, he pointed out, is that they could be used to inflict ‘widespread injustice and terror . . . when the Local Government is in a state of panic or excitement’.27 Far from being a measured and resolute response to a legitimate threat, then, Indian critics saw this as the hasty and excessive overreaction of an alarmist colonial administration. The Punjab disturbances of 1919 offer a striking picture of how the British colonial state in India responded to challenges to its authority. In times of crisis, British authorities frequently resorted to coercion, violence, and ‘terror’ tactics in order to maintain control over their wayward colonial subjects. As Raj Chandavarkar has pointed out, Britons in India were vastly outnumbered and surrounded by a potentially hostile population, making them particularly aware of their own vulnerability in the face of mass discontent. Overwhelming displays of violence and coercive power were therefore just as much about discouraging future resistance and bolstering their own prestige as they were about suppressing actual rebellion and disorder.28 But rather than being expressions of British strength and invincibility, these types of violent and oppressive practices do, indeed, seem more like the fitful and panicked behaviour of a colonial administration that was desperate to maintain its authority at any

 Report of the Commissioners Appointed by the Punjab Sub-Committee of the Indian National Congress (Lahore: K. Santanam, 1920), pp. 75–6 [hereafter Congress Report]. 26  Pearay Mohan, An Imaginary Rebellion and How it was Suppressed: An Account of the Punjab Disorders and the Working of Martial Law (Lahore: Khosla Bros., 1920). In ­addition to its fiery tone, this book also included a forward by the notable Punjabi revolutionary, Lala Lajpat Rai. 27  In the case of the Rowlatt Act, Mohan argued, officials could provide ‘no definite proofs’ to substantiate the necessity for the law, ‘but the whole affair was given a romantic touch by reference to the mysterious anarchist who is everywhere and nowhere, who lurks in the background, does all his work in secret, and is not to be found’: ibid., p. 12. 28  Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, Imperial Power and Popular Politics: Class, Resistance and the State in India, c. 1850–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 216–18. 25

Colonial Terror in Punjab9

cost – as contemporary Indian observers suggest.29 Using this event as a starting point, this book examines various other instances that challenged the illusion of colonial superiority and invincibility; moments that threatened colonial power and control; and the ways British colonisers used these recurring and persistent threats to justify the creation of a deeply oppressive and authoritarian system of rule. In so doing, it seeks not just to understand these ‘exceptional’ moments of crisis, but also how the everyday anxieties and concerns that preoccupied colonial administrators in India fed into the violent and coercive tendencies of the colonial state more generally. As its title suggests, this book argues that British colonial state-building in India was intimately tied up with and predicated on a deep-seated, pervasive, and permanent sense of insecurity. This book approaches these issues through an examination of colonial practices in one of the most strategically important provinces in the whole of British India: Punjab. At first glance, Punjab may seem an odd choice for a study of this nature. With its reputation as one the most stable, loyal, and economically prosperous provinces in all of British India, Punjab has often been seen as a colonial success story. Governed by a vigorous, forceful, and authoritarian system of rule known as the ‘Punjab School’, the province’s administration was widely admired throughout India and seen as a ‘model’ of colonial rule. During the catastrophic Rebellion of 1857, for example, Punjab remained loyal to the British cause and furnished the soldiers necessary to retake Delhi and other territories that had been lost to rebel forces. Following the Rebellion, Punjab was gradually transformed into the primary recruiting ground for the Indian armed forces, providing recruits that were not only essential to the defence of British India, but to the wider British Empire as well. When we delve deeper below the surface of these apparent colonial  The Congress report’s commentary on a lesser-known incident during the disturbances that occurred in the Sheikpura district just north-west of Lahore is particularly illuminating in this regard. In the early hours of 16 April 1919, the Extra Assistant Commissioner of Sheikhpura ordered an armoured train to open fire indiscriminately with its machine guns against anyone it encountered along the line between Sheikhpura and the small village of Chuharkana after mobs had looted the railway station and damaged telegraph and railway lines earlier that day. While the officer admitted that they could barely see whom they were shooting, he claimed that it was his intention to strike ‘terror’ into hearts of the district’s inhabitants in order to reassert control. The Congress committee concluded that this action was: ‘hasty, premature, indiscriminate and due to panic or over-zeal. To strike terror was no part of the officers’ business. It is a sign not of strength but of weakness, not a vindication of justice, but a perpetration of injustice’: Congress Report, p. 136. A more detailed version of the officers’ deposition appears in the Hunter Committee’s investigation: Evidence Taken Before the Disorders Inquiry Committee: Vol. V: Gujranwala, Gujrat, Lyallpur and Punjab Provincial (Calcutta: Superintendent Government Printing, 1920), p. 105.

29

10

Introduction: Fear, Panic, and the Violence of Empire

successes, however, a somewhat different picture emerges. Instead of a powerful and confident state, the archive reveals an anxious colonial administration that was fundamentally preoccupied with its own safety and security. Punjab officials not only remained deeply concerned about the supposed threat posed by the province’s ‘warlike’ inhabitants, who were ironically meant to be the stalwarts of imperial defence, but they also frequently resorted to brutal forms of violence and coercion when anti-colonial resistance imperilled colonial authority and prestige. This book traces how these systemic anxieties and concerns about the security and stability of the colonial regime were inscribed into the very foundations of colonial power in Punjab and beyond. 0.2

An Empire of Anxiety

One of the most familiar and enduring myths about the British Empire in India is that it was a powerful, confident, and nearly indomitable force. The influences of this myth can be seen in historical accounts emphasising the Empire’s role as a vehicle for the export of the essentially irresistible institutions, ideas, and technologies that helped to ‘make the modern world’.30 There are also certain quarters of public opinion that continue to insist on defending Britain’s imperial record by extolling its enlightened virtues of civilisational uplift and all the good it did for its colonies.31 Aside from their somewhat triumphal tone, these accounts largely gloss over the extent to which the British imperial project was often an anxious, uncertain, and occasionally tenuous endeavour. Over the last two decades, however, scholars have shown an increasing interest in unsettling and challenging the notion that the British Empire, and indeed European imperialism more generally, were always strong, confident, and rational projects. Instead of focussing on the ‘successes’ of imperialism, these studies examine the less well-known moments when imperial failures or setbacks elicited doubt, uncertainty, fear, and sometimes even panic from Europe’s supposedly unflinching imperialists.32  Niall Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (London: Allen Lane, 2003); Niall Ferguson, Civilization: the West and the Rest (London: Allen Lane, 2011); John Darwin, The Empire Project: the Rise and Fall of the British World-System 1830–1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); John Darwin, Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain (London: Allen Lane, 2012). 31  The arguments marshalled against a motion suggesting that Britain owes reparations to its former colonies in a 2015 debate at the Oxford Union is just one recent example of this. 32   See, for example, Linda Colley, Captives: Britain, Empire and the World, 1600–1850 (London: Pimlico, 2003); Ricardo Roque, ‘The Razor’s Edge: Portuguese Imperial Vulnerability in Colonial Moxico, Angola,’ The International Journal of African Historical 30

An Empire of Anxiety11

This book builds upon this growing body of work, and takes the vulnerability of British India as its main thematic concern. Unlike most previous studies, which have tended to limit themselves to literary and cultural examinations of imperial and colonial anxieties and vulnerabilities,33 this book traces how these perceived vulnerabilities were actually processed into the very foundations of colonial statecraft in India. As such, this book not only offers a reassessment of the ‘colonial condition’ and imperialism more generally, but also crucial insight into how this was translated directly into policy. British colonisers in India, it contends, frequently believed they were weaker than they actually were and acted in ways that were intended to reassure and assuage their own sense of insecurity. Ranajit Guha was one of the first to observe that the British colonial experience in India was characterised by an ‘indefinite and pervasive anxiety about being lost in empire’.34 Confronted by the sheer ‘immensity’ of the subcontinent, Guha describes how Britons in India found themselves discomforted as they struggled to come to grips with a foreign land that had no clearly defined or measurable limits.35 Moreover, as representatives of a ‘dominance without hegemony’ and an ‘autocracy that ruled without consent’, the British in India were always acutely aware of their separateness and ‘otherness’ from the Indians they were meant to rule over.36 A passage from Alfred C. Lyall, the future LieutenantGovernor of the North-Western Provinces and Chief Commissioner of Awadh, captures this sentiment quite well. ‘I cannot cease wondering’, Lyall wrote shortly after first arriving in India in 1856, ‘to find myself . . . in a wretched little hut in the very heart of India, surrounded by a tawny population, among whom it would seem that I have not the slightest business. The whole thing seems absurd on consideration’.37 Though Studies 36:1, Special Issue: Colonial Encounters Between Africa and Portugal (2003): pp. 105–24; John Savage, ‘“Black Magic” and White Terror: Slave Poisoning and Colonial Society in Early 19th Century Martinique’, Journal of Social History, 40:3 (Spring, 2007): pp. 635–62; Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009); Alex Tickell, Terrorism, Insurgency and Indian-English Literature, 1830–1947 (New York & London: Routledge, 2012); Reinkowski and Thum, Helpless Imperialists; Robert Peckham (ed.), Empires of Panic: Epidemics and Colonial Anxieties (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2015); Harald Fischer-Tiné (ed.), Anxieties, Fear and Panic in Colonial Settings: Empires on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2017). 33  See Yumna Siddiqi, Anxieties of Empire and the Fiction of Intrigue (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008); Tickell, Terrorism, Insurgency and Indian-English Literature. 34  Ranajit Guha, ‘Not at Home in Empire’, Critical Inquiry, 23:3, Front Lines/Border Posts (Spring, 1997), p. 484. 35  Ibid. 36  Ibid., p. 485. 37  Mortimer Durand, Life of the Right Hon. Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1913), p. 36.

12

Introduction: Fear, Panic, and the Violence of Empire

Guha is emphatic that this sort of anxiety should not be conflated with fear, his framework helps us to understand the discomforting structural conditions of colonial rule that contributed to a general sense of malaise, unease, and vulnerability felt by the British in India.38 Since Guha, other historians have also pointed to the recurring blind spots and weaknesses that wracked the British colonial administration in India. According to Jon Wilson, early British colonial rule in Bengal was a highly insecure, uncertain, and ‘anxious’ enterprise due to the fact that British rule essentially represented the rule of ‘strangers’.39 This sense of alienness felt by British officials was further compounded by their increasing tendency from the 1780s onward to rule using more abstract, objectifying, and impersonal methods of governance.40 Eschewing earlier forms of rule where East India Company officials would meaningfully take part in the everyday life and affairs of their subjects, they increasingly turned away from what C.A. Bayly has referred to as ‘affective’ and ‘patrimonial’ forms of knowledge in favour of more abstract information provided by statistics and surveys.41 This not only contributed to a growing sense of unease and alienation between British rulers and their subjects, according to Bayly, but also gave rise to various ‘information panics’ that periodically gripped British society in the first half of the nineteenth century. Information panics sprang to life at the margins of British authority, where their knowledge and control over local social practices and customs was at its weakest, and were triggered by the sudden ‘discovery’ of purported indigenous conspiracies that threatened colonial order. In the murky epistemological realm between certainty and imagination, anxious colonial officers surrounded by the unfamiliar began to envisage the existence cabals of well-poisoners, religious fanatics, and criminal fraternities, like the Thugs, around every corner.42 ‘The basic fear of the colonial official or settler was . . . his lack of indigenous knowledge and ignorance of the “wiles of the natives.” He feared their

 Anxiety, according to Guha, is a foreboding anticipation that something is about to occur, but with no clear idea of what that might be. Fear, on the other hand, requires a direct and specific object around which it can coalesce: a native rebellion or some other impending threat to colonial order and stability: Guha, ‘Not at Home in Empire’, p. 486. 39  Jon E. Wilson, The Domination of Strangers: Modern Governance in Eastern India, ­1780–1835 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 1–2. 40  Ibid., pp. 2, 5. 41  C.A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 167. 42   Ibid., p. 143. See also Kim A. Wagner, Thuggee: Banditry and the British in Early Nineteenth-Century India (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); David Arnold, ‘The Poison Panics in British India’, in Fischer-Tiné, Anxieties, Fear and Panic in Colonial Settings, pp. 49–71. 38

Punjab: The (In)Security State13

secret letters, their drumming and “bush telegraphy” and the nightly passage of seditious agents masquerading as priests and holy men’.43 Colonial knowledge may have been one of the foundations of colonial domination, but it also cut the other way when these same systems of knowledge began to unravel and come apart at the seams.44 Instead of reaffirming British power and authority, colonial knowledge could just as easily become a source of confusion, fear, and panic. It would be a great overstatement to claim that the prevailing British experience in India was defined by a sense of weakness. British rule remained remarkably durable, and the colonial state was far from powerless. Indeed, despite the fact that there were only ever a handful of Britons scattered across the great vastness of the Indian subcontinent, they were nonetheless able to exert a profound and often disruptive influence on the lives of ordinary Indians. The crucial point, however, is that there was an abiding sense among Britons that India was an unfamiliar and potentially dangerous place. Vastly outnumbered and surrounded by an alien and potentially hostile population, the British remained an exposed ruling minority. As such, they were very much alive to the danger that Indians might someday ‘call the bluff’ of their colonial overlords and rise up against them. Anticipated and imagined dangers were also just as potent in mobilising and shaping colonial behaviour as real and actual threats. To put it another way, British colonial anxieties did not require any real foundation to be influential. Indeed, this was the cornerstone of the colonial insecurity in India. As we shall see time and again throughout this book, one of the principal means by which the colonial actors were able to bolster and expand their powers and authority was by appealing to the latent anxieties and fears that gripped the British population in India. 0.3

Punjab: The (In)Security State

By inverting the familiar narrative of Punjab as a ‘garrison state’, and viewing it instead as an ‘insecurity state’, this book seeks to answer three  Bayly, Empire and Information, p. 6.  For the relationship between colonial knowledge and power, see, generally: Carol A. Breckenridge and Peter van der Veer (eds.), Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993); Bernard Cohn, Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996); Michael S. Dodson, Orientalism, Empire, and National Culture: India, 1770–1880 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Tony Ballantyne, ‘Colonial Knowledge’, in Sarah Stockwell (ed.), The British Empire: Themes and Perspectives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008): pp. 177–98; Ricardo Roque and Kim A. Wagner (eds.), Engaging Colonial Knowledge: Reading European Archives in World History (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

43 44

14

Introduction: Fear, Panic, and the Violence of Empire

main questions about the nature of British colonialism in India. The first question is why the colonial state so often resorted to authoritarianism, coercion, and violence. From spectacular forms of exemplary punishment meted out during the Rebellion of 1857 and the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre of 1919 to commonplace acts of everyday oppression and injustice committed against Indians by the police and the judicial system, the colonial project in India was deeply marked by violence. Yet despite the proliferation of a number of recent scholarly works on the phenomenon of colonial violence, none of these has satisfactorily attempted to understand the logic behind this violence.45 Why, for example, was it necessary to execute rebels by tying them to cannons, or to kick an Indian servant to death? And what, moreover, is the shared logic between a dramatic public execution, and a private beating administered in the domestic sphere? It is the contention of this book that we can answer both of these questions by looking to the ways that colonial violence was often produced by a sense of colonial vulnerability and weakness. As Thomas Metcalf makes clear in the case of the Rebellion of 1857, the act of blowing mutineers apart with guns was the expression not of a confident and secure colonial administration, but of one that saw itself as under siege and fighting for its very survival.46 Through this extreme act of spectacular violence, the British attempted to soothe their own sense of vulnerability by wreaking terrible vengeance on their recalcitrant Indian subjects. Everyday acts of personal violence directed against Indian servants in the domestic sphere, as Elizabeth Collingham has noted, were also driven by the perceived need to uphold and reassert racial prestige and dominance.47 Although Collingham does not make the connection between white vulnerability and colonial violence explicit, it is clear that the reason Britons so frequently resorted to physical violence in response to any perceived slight to their dignity was that they realised that their authority, power, and ultimate safety depended upon upholding the image of white superiority and invincibility. It is important to stress that  Jordanna Bailkin, ‘The Boot and the Spleen: When Was Murder Possible in British India?’ Comparative Studies in Society and History, 48:2 (2006): pp. 463–93; Sherman, State Violence and Punishment; Elizabeth Kolsky, Colonial Justice in British India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 46  ‘The intensity of the punishment meted out’, he writes, ‘reflected the vulnerability of the British in India, precariously set over a vast land they barely comprehended. Desperate and fearful, they sought to quell by a vengeful terror the harrowing vision of the loyal sepoy or faithful bearer as a treacherous murderer’: Thomas R. Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj.The New Cambridge History of India, III. 4 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 44. 47  Elizabeth Collingham, Imperial Bodies, The Physical Experience of the Raj, c. 1800–1947 (Cambridge: Polity, 2001), p. 142. 45

Punjab: The (In)Security State15

the point here is not to excuse, justify, or in any way trivialise the brutality of these events. As Paul Gilroy reminds us, there is a very real danger in attempting to cast imperialists as ‘victims’ or in blaming the colonised for their own exploitation.48 Instead, this book reveals how the anxious and insecure condition of colonial rule helped embed violence into its very foundations and normalise this in the eyes of a self-proclaimed liberal, ‘civilising’ regime. Michael Taussig was one of the first scholars to posit a connection between the atrocities committed by colonial regimes and the latent anxieties and fears experienced by white populations who found themselves surrounded by ‘primitive’, ‘savage’, non-white populations in the colonial world. According to him, colonists and rubber company employees during the rubber boom in Colombia concocted a horrific, yet fictionalised colonial phantasmagoria about the purported savagery of the local indigenous populations. Through a process of ‘colonial mimesis’ that reflected this perceived barbarity back onto themselves, these colonists were then able to enact regimes of systematic torture and terror that mirrored the same sort of frightfulness that they themselves feared.49 The only way that the colonisers could live in such a terrifying world, Taussig argues, was for them to inspire terror themselves.50 Fearful colonial fantasies, as Ann Laura Stoler has shown, were also integral to the harsh repression, brutalisation, and violent reprisals against Sumatra’s indigenous and immigrant labour populations by Dutch planters. In the absence of reliable or ‘certain’ knowledge, colonial officials were often susceptible to rumours and their own imaginations, creating horrific colonial fantasies that helped fuel and justify planter violence.51 Dominik J. Schaller’s work on the German genocide of the Herero, Nama, Ngoni, and other groups in present-day Namibia and Tanzania has also shown that these terrible massacres were motivated in large part by the sense of fear white German settlers felt toward the local African populations.52  Paul Gilroy, After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? (Abingdon: Routledge, 2004), p. 103.  One of the essential things Taussig’s work makes clear is that colonial fearfulness did not have to be real or have any ontological basis in fact, so long as it was believed to be true by the colonisers: Michael Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 133. 50  Ibid., pp. 122, 125. 51   Ann Laura Stoler, ‘“In Cold Blood”: Hierarchies of Credibility and the Politics of Colonial Narratives’, Representations, 37, Special Issue: Imperial Fantasies and Postcolonial Histories (Winter, 1992): pp. 151–89. 52  Dominik J. Schaller, ‘From Conquest to Genocide: Colonial Rule in German Southwest Africa and German East Africa’, in A. Dirk Moses (ed.), Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History (New York & Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2008), p. 311. 48

49

16

Introduction: Fear, Panic, and the Violence of Empire

Colonial violence was, of course, heavily mediated by race and the need to maintain the prestige of the white European population. The essential paradox of the colonial situation, as Michael Vann has pointed out in his study of violence in French Hanoi, is that whites remained a tiny minority surrounded by a hostile majority. Thus, while colonial racial hierarchies gave whites extraordinary power, the contradiction between white power and white vulnerability made racial violence a central feature of colonialism.53 Acts of native resistance, defiance, and physical violence that threatened white prestige prompted extremely brutal and often disproportionate responses from ‘hysterical’ whites seeking to reassert their own privileged status.54 R.W. Kostal has similarly explained the use of ‘terror’ tactics (torture, burnings, summary executions) during the suppression of 1865 Morant Bay Uprising in Jamaica as an attempt by the small, scattered, and fearful white community to provide a terrifying and exemplary deterrent spectacle that would keep the island’s much larger black population in check.55 Just three years later, W.W. Hunter would refer to the events in Jamaica in order to help explain the vitriolic reaction of the British public to the Santhal Rebellion of 1855–6 in Bengal, arguing that it was a ‘natural’ tendency for a small white community, surrounded by foreigners, to panic, overreact, and commit these types of ‘excesses’ when it felt threatened. ‘The Anglo-Indian community is naturally liable to apprehensions and hasty conclusions incident to a small body of settlers surrounded by an alien and a greatly more numerous race’, Hunter explained. ‘People who live in this situation are prone to exaggerate danger, as the Jamaican white population exaggerated it, and to be carried into excesses such as the Jamaica troops committed’.56

 Michael Vann, ‘Fear and Loathing French Hanoi: Colonial White Images and Imaginings of “Native” Violence’, in Martin Thomas (ed.), The French Colonial Mind: Violence, Military Encounters, and Colonialism, 2 vols. (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2011), vol. 2, p. 52. For an examination of the centrality of racial prestige within the legal and political framework of French imperialism, see Emmanuelle Saada, ‘The Empire of Law: Dignity, Prestige, and the Colonial Situation’, French Politics, Culture, and Society, 20:2, Special Issue: Regards Croisés: Transatlantic Perspectives on the Colonial Situation (2002): pp. 98–120. 54  Vann, ‘Fear and Loathing’, p. 70. 55  R.W. Kostal, A Jurisprudence of Power: Victorian Empire and the Rule of Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 7. 56  Although Hunter was in no way endorsing this – and actually insisted that it was the duty of the government to restrain the tendency of the public to panic and overreact – he also believed that in this particular instance the government had gone too far to the ‘opposite extreme’ by greatly underestimating the extent of the danger posed by the insurrection, and had endangered British lives: W.W. Hunter, The Annals of Rural Bengal, vol. 1 (London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 1868), pp. 241–2. 53

Punjab: The (In)Security State17

The second issue that this book explores is the tense and often fraught relationship between British conceptions of legality and the exigencies of maintaining the safety and stability of the colonial regime. Since the 1780s, the idea of a government that both respected and was bound by the law had been central to British attempts to establish the moral supremacy of their brand of rule over the arbitrary sovereignty and ‘personal discretion’ of the regime of oriental despotism they were supposed to have replaced.57 This belief in the universal rule of law, however, competed with an equally, if not more, important colonial imperative of maintaining ‘illimitable’ forms of sovereignty and executive authority to protect the colonial regime in times of crisis or emergency.58 This book examines how British officials frequently seized upon this argument in order to justify what were deeply authoritarian and often brutally violent interventions. In some cases, individual officers willingly and openly transgressed the bounds of the law in order to achieve their goals. Usually, these were individuals stationed on the ‘front lines’ of the colonial encounter, the so-called ‘men on the spot’. As we shall see, these officers were often the ones who felt most exposed to the potential dangers that menaced Britons in India, and they justified their actions by claiming that they were absolutely necessary to safeguard the lives of the ‘ruling race’ and the colonial regime they represented (Dyer’s handling of the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre was just one of the more prominent examples of this). Yet, in so doing, these ‘rogue’ officers placed the colonial government in a difficult position. To condemn these individuals might undermine their initiative and weaken the ability of the colonial state to act vigorously during times of crisis or emergency, while turning a blind eye risked subverting its crucial claim to legitimacy that it was a regime governed by the rule of law. In order to resolve this tension, some officials used concerns about British vulnerability to lobby for the creation of ‘­special’ legislation bestowing a striking array of despotic and deadly executive prerogatives onto individual officers and local governments. This, in turn, prompted new forms of discussion and debate between colonial India’s various (and sometimes competing) levels of authority and jurisdiction that would continue until the end of the Raj in 1947.

  Sandra den Otter, ‘Law, Authority, and Colonial Rule’, in Douglas M. Peers and Nandini Gooptu (eds.), India and the British Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 168; Radhika Singha, A Despotism of Law: Crime and Justice in Early Colonial India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998). 58  Hussain, The Jurisprudence of Emergency, pp. 5, 7. 57

18

Introduction: Fear, Panic, and the Violence of Empire

With its emphasis on personal authority and discretion, this version of colonial jurisprudence evoked a distinctly ‘sovereign’ notion of power in which individuals and groups were excluded from the normal political and juridical order through the invocation of states of exception.59 This book demonstrates how these moments and zones of legal exception that were regularly enacted throughout India and Punjab, however controversial and contested, were ultimately made possible only through the existence of a widespread belief among the British population that the colonial regime existed in a state of constant peril and needed to be protected at any cost. The law in colonial India was thus used both as a ‘weapon’ to persecute and oppress the colonised, and as a ‘shield’ to protect the colonisers against charges of illegality and misconduct while doing so.60 Instead of being the ‘supreme gift imparted by imperial rule’,61 as British imperialists themselves would have us believe, the notion of the rule of law was often a cover for the anxieties of empire. Finally, this book examines the ways in which the same institutions and mechanisms that were supposed to protect the colonial state ironically became chronic sources of insecurity in their own right. From the outset, British officials in Punjab were deeply concerned about pacifying what they viewed to be a particularly turbulent and warlike population. As a result, steps were taken to tie the interests and loyalty of important groups throughout Punjab toward the government through the expansion of irrigation, generous revenue assessments, and eventually military recruitment. This process was the cornerstone of Punjab’s so-called ‘garrison state’. The great irony of all this, however, was that as the state became more dependent on these groups to prop up its rule, the warier it became of anything that might upset this delicate political balance. These types of concerns became even more acute as Punjab gradually developed into a vital source of coercive manpower to the wider empire during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Beginning in

 For a summary of the debates surrounding the concept of ‘sovereignty’, see Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Vol. 1: The Will to Knowledge (London: Penguin Books, 1990); Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998); Lauren Benton, A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Ann Laura Stoler, ‘On Degrees of Imperial Sovereignty’, Public Culture, 18:1 (2006), pp. 125–46; Achille Mbembe, ‘Necropolitics’, Public Culture, 15:1 (2003), pp. 11–40; Hussain, Jurisprudence of Emergency. 60   John L. Comaroff and Jean Comaroff, ‘Law and Disorder in the Postcolony: an Introduction’, in John L. Comaroff and Jean Comaroff (eds.), Law and Disorder in the Postcolony (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), pp. 29–31. 61  Karuna Mantena, Alibis of Empire: Henry Maine and the Ends of Liberal Imperialism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), pp. 90–1. 59

Structure of the Book19

the 1880s, Punjabis became highly prized as soldiers and policemen, and were extensively employed by Britain’s colonial possessions in Africa, Southeast Asia, and China. While this provided obvious benefits to the empire as a whole, the sheer popularity of Punjabi recruits also gave rise to new fears that the unrestricted mobility of these martial subjects could potentially undermine the strength of the Indian Army as well as the stability of British rule in Punjab and India more generally. Far from being the stalwart defender of British India, then, this book demonstrates how the use of Punjab as the coercive arm of the Raj was a double-edged sword that, in turn, prompted new forms of coercive political and legal intervention on the part of the colonial state. By studying the colonial anxieties and insecurities of British India’s garrison state par excellence, it is possible for us to obtain a more complex understanding of how colonial power operated in India more generally. While some might argue that the colonial experience in Punjab was always somewhat ‘exceptional’ and thus unrepresentative, this book asserts that the Punjab system actually reflected and helped shape a number of practices that cut to the very heart of the colonial project. Punjab’s incorporation into British India in 1849, for instance, was the culmination of a protracted period of instability in which the East India Company struggled to establish itself in the face of fierce competition from various successor states to the Mughal Empire. The chronic doubts and uncertainties of this earlier period had a formative influence on the early strategies adopted by the new Punjab Government. Similarly, the so-called emphasis on executive authority and discretion that constituted the hallmark of the Punjab School of governance both drew upon and influenced a wider legal culture in India, particularly during the codification movement of the 1860s and 1870s. Finally, Punjab’s vital importance as the main recruiting ground for the Indian Army meant that developments within this province had a profound impact not just on the Raj, but on the wider strategies of security and defence for the British Empire. This book shows how, far from being peripheral to understandings of the nature of British colonialism, Punjab was actually a laboratory for a number of practices and ideas that were later exported to the wider empire. 0.4

Structure of the Book

This book is organised thematically, but unfolds in a roughly chronological order. Each chapter examines a different aspect of how colonial anxieties were integral to colonial state-building. Chapter 1 begins by providing an overview of the rise and expansion of British colonial power

20

Introduction: Fear, Panic, and the Violence of Empire

in India with an emphasis on how a sense of systemic anxiety, insecurity, and vulnerability became an entrenched and central part of the ‘colonial condition’. During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, British rule in India was far from secure, and faced a number of challenges and sometimes disastrous reversals at the hands of the subcontinent’s various Mughal successor states, including the Marathas and the Kingdom of Mysore. As numerous historians have pointed out, the Company’s internecine wars against these Mughal successor states led to the securitisation of the colonial governing apparatus and the emergence of a ‘garrison state’ in which military priorities dominated. Influential soldier-­administrators, for instance, used this sense of uncertainty and precariousness to advance their own political agendas and careers. In so doing, however, they also cemented the notion that India was a place of constant intrigue, danger, and upheaval. Following the Rebellion of 1857, these fears of external threats evolved into a sense of permanent siege mentality in which colonial officials were constantly anticipating another rebellion. This enabled the introduction of invasive and repressive mechanisms of surveillance, as well as the expansion of the state’s judicial and executive powers. Chapter 2 examines how the early Punjab Government’s attempts to consolidate their control over the recently-annexed province laid the foundations for a strategically crucial, yet uneasy relationship with Punjab’s Sikh inhabitants. After disbanding the defeated Khalsa army of the Sikh kingdom in 1849, the British were presented with the complex problem of how to transform thousands of former Sikh soldiers into governable subjects. Confronted with what they perceived as a warlike, dangerous, and potentially criminal element of Punjabi society, anxious British colonial officers sought to pacify and placate these disbanded soldiers by turning them into productive and quiescent yeoman farmers. In order to secure the loyalty and contentment of this group, the new Punjab Government began a policy of nervous conciliation, which included different forms of political and economic patronage. The wisdom of this policy was confirmed in British eyes during the Rebellion of 1857 when these Sikhs not only remained loyal, but actually flocked to the British banner and helped them retake territories that had been lost to the rebels. Thereafter, Sikhs became one of the primary groups recruited by the Indian Army, and this same pattern of economic and political conciliation was expanded to other ‘loyal’ military groups throughout Punjab, including the Muslims from the western part of the province. Yet despite the apparent success of this system and the overall loyalty of these soldier-cultivators throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Punjab authorities remained haunted by fears that these ‘warlike’

Structure of the Book21

and ‘turbulent’ subjects still might someday rebel against them. In 1907, after a series of rural agitations broke out across the province, a visibly panicked Punjab Government believed that this much-prophesied calamity was finally at hand and requested a series of emergency powers in order to crush this resistance. Although the protests were eventually soothed through more conciliatory measures, the 1907 Punjab ­disturbances provided a vivid demonstration of what could occur if the delicate balance between the British colonial state and its crucial soldier-cultivators was upset, and served as an indelible reminder to colonial officials of the perennially precarious situation which existed in India when even the most ‘loyal’ sections of Indian society could turn again them. Chapter 3 explores the imperial controversy surrounding the suppression of the so-called ‘Kooka outbreak’ of 1872. On the afternoon of 17 January 1872, Ludhiana Deputy Commissioner J.L. Cowan summarily executed 49 Sikh ‘rebels’ by blowing them from the mouths of artillery guns. After obtaining the approval of his superior, T.D. Forsyth, Cowan executed an additional 16 prisoners the following day in the same manner. Although Cowan and Forsyth claimed that this swift and terrible reprisal had prevented a minor outbreak from spiralling into a full-scale ‘rebellion’, their actions sparked a heated debate in both India and Britain about the extent to which colonial officers had the right to transgress written laws and procedures in order to safeguard the colonial regime in times of ‘crisis’ or ‘emergency’. While critics of Cowan and Forsyth claimed that their response had been induced by ‘panic’ and was utterly excessive, their supporters argued that the ever-present danger of rebellions and ‘fanatical’ conspiracies in Punjab and India sometimes justified these types of harsh and exemplary measures. This chapter argues that while this event was clearly the outcome of a set of deeply entrenched beliefs that characterised the so-called Punjab School of governance, it was also reflective of a much more pervasive set of beliefs that characterised British colonial power more generally. British ideals about the rule of law in India competed with an equally important and arguably more urgent imperative that insisted that, as a ‘regime of conquest’, the colonial government needed to preserve an ‘illimitable’ form of sovereignty in order to secure its own safety and stability. As such, far from being a strong and confident expression of colonial power and authority, this chapter argues that the Punjab School and the ‘Kooka outbreak’ were expressions of the fundamental anxieties and insecurities that underpinned colonial rule. Chapter 4 examines the history of one of the most brutal-minded and draconian laws ever created in colonial India: the ‘Murderous Outrages Act’ of 1867 (MOA).This law gave colonial officials along the North-West

22

Introduction: Fear, Panic, and the Violence of Empire

Frontier (NWF) wide powers to transgress India’s regular judicial codes in order to summarily execute and dispose of individuals identified as ‘fanatics’ who assaulted or murdered British personnel. Sporadic attacks of this nature began shortly after the British assumed direct control of the frontier in 1849, and occurred right up until Indian Independence in 1947. These attacks terrified the colonial establishment, highlighting the vulnerability, weakness, and inability of the colonial regime to protect its own in what was seen to be one of the most dangerous and ‘turbulent’ regions within the whole of the British Empire. Although justifications for this law ultimately hinged on the purportedly ‘exceptional’ nature of the frontier, this chapter argues that its legacies extend well beyond the region, and provided a sort of model for similarly ‘repressive’ legislation enacted by other governments across colonial India during the height of the revolutionary nationalist movement in the twentieth century. Chapter 5 explores how the recruitment and employment of Punjabi soldiers and policemen in Britain’s overseas colonies became a source of chronic insecurity and vulnerability for the GOI. By the late nineteenth century, Punjab was one of the most strategically vital outposts within the entire British Empire. Not only was it the primary recruiting ground for the Indian Army, but it also increasingly furnished vital police and military manpower to British colonies outside of India. Although most historians have emphasised the numerous benefits that Punjabi police and military labour provided to the wider empire, this chapter examines how this same recruitment and movement of Punjabis overseas also created new challenges and problems for the GOI. Whether it was fears that the popularity of overseas service was sapping the strength of the Indian Army and weakening its ability to defend against a potential Russian invasion through Afghanistan; rumours that Punjabis were taking up military service with Britain’s European imperial rivals; or the panic caused by the return of radicalised ex-servicemen under the banner of the Ghadar Party during the First World War, the use of Punjabi military and police labour actually became a source of chronic colonial anxiety and insecurity. This acute sense of imperial vulnerability, in turn, prompted new forms of coercive political and legal intervention on the part of the colonial state. The notorious 1915 Defence of India Act (DOI Act), for instance, was not, as most historians would have it, a response primarily motivated by the very real threat of revolutionary violence in Bengal. Rather, it was the product of a sustained lobbying effort on the part of Punjab’s Lieutenant-Governor Michael O’Dwyer, who used the greatly exaggerated threat that Ghadar posed to Punjab’s delicate rural-military political balance in order to expand the arsenal of coercive powers at his disposal.

Structure of the Book23

Altogether, these chapters present a very different story about the colonial experience in India than that to which we are most accustomed. Frequent setbacks, reverses, and defeats elicited uncertainty, anxiety, and a profound sense of precariousness from Britain’s supposedly indomitable colonisers. Far from being a unified, rational, or coherent project, the British colonial endeavour was consistently shaped by conflicting and sometimes irrational impulses. Colonial officials often disagreed about the best way of preserving the security and stability of the colonial regime. As a result, they developed a range of different strategies and tactics in their attempts to mitigate the apparently endless dangers that seemed to menace colonial order. These could range from stunning acts of performative violence, draconian legal measures, to more conciliatory methods of negotiated settlement, economic patronage, and even political compromise. What united these seemingly disparate strands was the desire by British officials to protect a regime that they believed was in constant danger and needed to be guarded with unceasing vigilance and strong-armed rule. Because this book is interested in understanding the centrality of insecurity and vulnerability to the colonial project in India, it necessarily deals in depth with the reconstruction and interrogation of British perceptions and beliefs through the ‘colonial’ archive. One of the main assumptions of this book is that the British frequently believed they were weaker than they actually were, and acted in ways that reflected this sense of colonial fragility. Sometimes, these expressions of colonial insecurity were made quite explicit. Anxious British administrators were frequently worried about rebellions, violent crime, and seditious propaganda, and discussed these issues openly. Other times, however, it is necessary to parse the bravado of colonial rhetoric and read ‘along the archival grain’ in order to access the restless uncertainties underlying what otherwise appear to be bold expressions of colonial self-assurance.62 By emphasising the dangers they faced in India, British officials were able to justify deeply unequal power hierarchies, and suppress any form of anti-colonial resistance that threatened to overturn the colonial order. While there were undoubtedly certain shrewd administrators who cynically exaggerated threats or deliberately manufactured plots and conspiracies as a means of expanding their own realms of influence and authority, it is equally true that a great number of Britons remained genuinely concerned about the safety and security of their position in India. Indeed, it would not have been possible to reconcile all of the oppressive and brutal practices of

 Stoler, Along the Archival Grain.

62

24

Introduction: Fear, Panic, and the Violence of Empire

colonialism if there had not been a widespread consensus among British authorities in India that these were absolutely necessary for the continued survival of the colonial regime. This book is based on seven years of extensive research conducted in the UK, India, and Pakistan, and draws on a wide range of sources. These include official correspondence and publications; private papers, letters, and personal memoirs; newspapers and periodicals; and contemporary monographs. Although a great deal of official correspondence and government publications were sent back to London from India, the National Archives of India (NAI) contain a number of ‘B’ files (­matters of routine) that were not typically transferred to the imperial metropole. An additional benefit of using the NAI records is that many of the ‘A’ files (matters of importance that were sent back to London) contain valuable ‘KW’ (‘Keep With’) notes that provide evolving commentaries, opinions, and discussions between colonial officials that were not always reproduced in the final official record. These are particularly crucial in understanding the agonising controversy surrounding the so-called ‘Kooka outbreak’ discussed in Chapter 3. Finally, this book also makes use of different Indian sources, including monographs and official publications by the INC, as well as revolutionary newspaper and print material. Indian politicians, nationalist leaders, and revolutionaries often provided some of the most astute observations and trenchant critiques of the British tendency to exaggerate and distort the perils that menaced colonial order as a means of expanding the already considerable powers available to colonial officers.

1

Colonial Insecurity in Early British India, 1757–1857

1.1 Introduction There was nothing inevitable about the eventual triumph of British power in the Indian subcontinent. From the moment that they first arrived off India’s shores in 1601, English traders flying the banner of the East India Company (EIC, henceforth also referred to as ‘the Company’) were confronted with an incredibly sophisticated, heterogeneous, and strange civilisation they struggled to come to grips with. Indeed, for the first century and a half that it attempted to establish and assert itself in India, the Company suffered repeated setbacks, (perceived) insults and humiliations, and defeats at the hands of the much more powerful Mughal Empire and its various representatives.1 Even in the second half of the eighteenth century, when the Company began to enjoy greater success against the Mughals and various other regional India states that were emerging from the weakening Mughal polity, colonial officials remained deeply aware of their contingent and often precarious position in India. This chapter examines what might be described as a ‘colonial culture of insecurity’ in India. It begins with an examination of how the Company’s wars of expansion in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries helped cement the notion of India as a land of crisis and danger into both the popular and official colonial imagination. The two Anglo-Sikh Wars (1845–6 and 1848–9) were particularly influential in reinforcing these ideas, as they were both difficult conflicts that stretched the Company to the limits of its strength and authority. This image of India as an inherently warlike, tumultuous, and perilous place attained particular prominence as a result of the writings of military officers who attempted to historicise and justify the continued presence of a strong military establishment in India. Finally, this chapter ends with an examination of how the Rebellion of 1857 became the focal point for a new generation of  For an excellent and very recent exploration of this, see Jon Wilson, India Conquered: Britain’s Raj and the Chaos of Empire (London: Simon & Schuster, 2016).

1

25

26

Colonial Insecurity in Early British India, 1757–1857

colonial anxieties and fears about colonial insecurity, leading to the proliferation and expansion of new forms of political surveillance, and judicial and police powers. As such, this chapter demonstrates how the expansion of the colonial state’s coercive apparatuses and authoritarian tendencies were fuelled by a persistent and profound sense of impending danger, crisis, vulnerability, and potential catastrophe that haunted the minds of anxious British administrators. 1.2

An Empire Born in Crisis

The British empire in India was born at the conjuncture of a series of local and imperial crises. Beginning in the early eighteenth century, the gradual collapse of Mughal central authority signalled a profound shift in the Indian political landscape and gave rise to various regional successor states vying for control of the subcontinent.2 In order to secure its commercial trading privileges in this increasingly tumultuous and uncertain political climate, the EIC began to involve itself much more directly with the internal politics of these new successor states, particularly in Bengal.3 In 1756, growing tensions between the Company and Bengal’s new ruler, Siraj-ud-daula, came to a head after he ordered it to halt construction on new fortifications in the city of Calcutta that were intended to defend against a potential attack from the French, with whom the British were currently battling in the Seven Years’ War (1756–63). When the Company refused, Siraj-ud-daula promptly sacked the city and took large numbers of prisoners, some of whom later suffocated to death in a crowded prison cell, giving rise to the powerful and gory legend of the ‘Black Hole of Calcutta’.4 In response, the Company brought up its army from Madras in the south to re-take Calcutta. On 23 June 1757, the Company inflicted a decisive defeat against Siraj-ud-daula’s forces at the Battle of Plassey and assumed direct control of Bengal. Over the next

 C.A. Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars: North Indian Society in the Age of British Expansion, 1770–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Muzaffar Alam, The Crisis of Empire in Mughal North India: Awadh and the Punjab, 1707–48 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986); Stewart Gordon, Marathas, Marauders, and State Formation in Eighteenth-Century India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994). 3  P.J. Marshall, Bengal: The British Bridgehead, Eastern India 1740–1828 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); P.J. Marshall, ‘Reappraisal: The Rise of British Power in Eighteenth-Century India’, South Asia, 19:1 (1996): pp. 71–6. 4  For an excellent recent examination of the mythology surrounding this event, see Partha Chatterjee, The Black Hole of Empire: History of a Global Practice of Power (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012). 2

An Empire Born in Crisis27

several years, the Company became embroiled in numerous other wars and conflicts with other Mughal successor states.5 Although it enjoyed a great deal of success in these endeavours, the Company also suffered its fair share of defeats and reversals. As a result, Company officials in India remained acutely aware of the fact that their safety and security ultimately relied on the strength of their armed forces.6 In his highly influential treatise on the history of the founding of the Company’s empire in India, Sketch of the Political History of India (1811), John Malcolm highlighted the crucial role played by the military in ­maintaining its rule: The truth is, that from the day on which the Company’s troops marched one mile from their factories, the increase of their territories and their armies became a principle of self-preservation; and at the end of every one of those numerous contests, in which they were involved by the jealousy, avarice or ambition, of their neighbours, or the rapacity and ambition of their own servants, they were forced to adopt measures for improving their strength; which soon appeared to be the only mode by which they could avert the occurrence of similar danger.7

Malcolm, of course, was one of the Company’s most eminent and hawkish soldier-statesmen, and his Sketch was written as a justification for the recent period of aggressive territorial expansion under his mentor, Governor-General Richard Wellesley (1798–1805).8 Throughout his Sketch, Malcolm presented an anxious depiction of the apparent insecurity and vulnerability of India, claiming at one point that, ‘The only safe view that Great Britain can take of it’s [sic] Empire in India, is to consider it (as it really is) always in a state of danger, and to nominate persons to rule it, calculated, from their superior energy of character, to meet every emergency that can arise’.9 Malcolm’s writing vividly captures the often  For a recent synthesis of the conflicts and wars that shaped the Company’s early expansion in India, see G.J. Bryant, The Emergence of British Power in India, 1600–1784 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2013). 6  James Lees, ‘A “Tranquil Spectator”: The District Official and the Practice of Local Government in Late Eighteenth-Century Bengal’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 38:1 (March 2010), p. 1. According to J.R. Seeley, British power in India ultimately depended on the strength of its native army, without which, the British would have been forced to recognise the ‘impossibility’ of retaining India: J.R. Seeley, The Expansion of England: Two Courses of Lectures (London: Macmillan, 1883), pp. 227–8. 7  John Malcolm, Sketch of the Political History of India from the Introduction of Mr. Pitt’s Bill, A.D. 1784, to the Present Date (London: William Miller, 1811), pp. 4–5. 8  Jack Harrington, Sir John Malcolm and the Creation of British India (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 40. 9  Malcolm, Sketch of the Political History of India, p. 459. 5

28

Colonial Insecurity in Early British India, 1757–1857

uncertain and tenuous nature of early Company rule in India, and was largely shaped by his first-hand experiences as an army officer during years of sustained warfare against India’s Mughal successor states during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. When Malcolm began his career in Madras in 1783, the future of the Company and its military security were far from certain. Company armies had suffered recent defeats at the hands of Hyder Ali of the kingdom of Mysore, and Maratha power was in ascendancy in central India.10 Yet even after the defeat of Mysore in 1799 and the Maratha threat receded in 1804, the Company’s military men in the South lived in fear of challenges from an assortment of disaffected local nobles; roving bands of armed auxiliaries who had once fought alongside the Marathas; and various other so-called ‘primitive’, ‘barbarous’, or ‘fanatical’ groups.11 According to Jack Harrington, the instability and vulnerability that Malcolm experienced during his formative years in Madras had an enduring impact on him and influenced the trajectory of his political thinking throughout his entire career.12 In many ways, however, Malcolm’s anxieties about the Company’s insecurity in Madras were hardly unique, and were shared by numerous other EIC officials throughout India. One of the most formidable challenges to Company power during the early nineteenth century came from a loose coalition of Indian princes and deshmukhs (local chiefs) located in India’s central Deccan region known as the Marathas. Beginning in the seventeenth century, the Marathas waged a series of wars against the Mughal and Durrani empires, acquiring vast amounts of wealth and territory. By the end of the eighteenth century the combined military might of its powerful ruling families easily rivalled that of the Company.13 Although militarily powerful, the Maratha polities were politically and financially unstable. The ability of the peshwa (prime minister) in Pune – the ostensible Maratha capital – to control his independently-minded princes was always relatively constrained, and Maratha state treasuries were largely dependent on plunder to pay for their extensive armies. When Maratha leaders could no longer afford to pay for the services of their armed retainers, these groups often struck off on their own and began to raid and pillage the countryside. These so-called pindaris presented a perennial problem for local rulers from the mid-eighteenth century, and  Harrington, Sir John Malcolm, pp. 18–19.  David Washbrook, ‘South India 1770–1840: The Colonial Transition’, Modern Asian Studies, 38:3 (July 2004), p. 491. 12  Harrington, Sir John Malcolm, pp. 36–7. 13  These included the Raos of Pune, the Scindias of Gwalior, the Holkars of Indore, the Bhonsles of Nagpur, and the Gaekwars of Baroda. 10 11

An Empire Born in Crisis29

by the early nineteenth century they had not only caused massive economic devastation throughout the Deccan, but had also begun preying upon the relatively affluent and prosperous border territories under the Company’s control.14 Mounted pindari raiders took advantage of their much greater speed and mobility to conduct lightning strikes and then frequently retreated before the Company’s unwieldy infantry forces had time to mobilise.15 These persistent attacks damaged colonial prestige by highlighting the exposed nature of Company territory and the inability of its armies to protect its subjects. Between 1775 and 1819, the Company fought three difficult and costly wars against the Marathas and their erstwhile pindari auxiliaries. Although the Company was ultimately triumphant, its contests with the Marathas and pindaris were hardly a foregone conclusion.16 The Company’s final victory in the Third AngloMaratha War (1816–19), for instance, was less the product of military superiority than it was the result of tenuous negotiations and shrewd compromises. Instead of crushing Maratha and pindari resistance, Company forces – already stretched to their limit from operating over vast swathes of t­ erritory – resorted to brokerage and accommodation to bring these groups to heel.17 Far from being an overwhelming colonial triumph, then, the various Maratha campaigns actually highlighted the limitations and fallibilities of the Company’s power. Victory in the Third Anglo-Maratha War established the Company’s supremacy within the subcontinent, but it did little to soothe the ­lingering sense of insecurity that pervaded colonial society. With its main external enemies defeated, the Company now turned inward and began to fear ruination from within. Just a few years before the final defeat of the Marathas, Malcolm provided testimony to a parliamentary committee in

 According to Arthur Wellesley: ‘They [the Marathas] do not choose to keep armies themselves, their territories are overrun by a race of armed men, who are ready to enlist with any body [sic] who will lead them to plunder; and there is no power in the country to support the government and give protection to the industrious classes of the inhabitants, excepting the British troops’: Wellesley to Major Shawe, 26 February 1804, in John Gurwood (ed.), The Dispatches of Field Marshal the Duke of Wellington During His Various Campaigns in India, Denmark, Portugal, Spain, the Low Countries, and France, From 1799 to 1818, 13 vols (London: John Murray, 1837), vol. 3, p. 99. See also Gordon, Marathas; M.P. Roy, Origin, Growth and Suppression of the Pindaris (New Delhi: Sterling Publishers, 1973). 15  Mesrob Vartavarian, ‘Pacification and Patronage in the Maratha Deccan, 1803–1818’, Modern Asian Studies, 50:6 (November 2016): pp. 1749–91. 16  As military historians point out, Maratha armaments and tactics were equal to those of the Company: Randolf G.S. Cooper, The Anglo-Maratha Campaigns and the Contest for India: The Struggle for Control of the South Asian Military Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 17  Vartavarian, ‘Pacification and Patronage’. 14

30

Colonial Insecurity in Early British India, 1757–1857

which he gestured towards the various dangers that persisted in spite of the Company’s recent feats of arms: That our territories in India contain a great number of seditious and discontented men, there can be no doubt; and as those men, in any object they may have of subverting our empire, have lost all hope of doing that through the means of foreign enemies, we must expect that their exertions will be doubly active in trying to foment internal insurrection and revolt.18

Several years later, in 1835, Governor-General Bentinck (1828–35) – ironically the man entrusted with reining in the sort of overblown military expenditure advocated by hawks like Malcolm – echoed this same warning: though no danger appears in any real or tangible shape, it must be allowed when one hundred millions of people are under the control of a Government which has no hold whatever on their affections, when out of this population is formed that army, upon the fidelity of which we rely principally for our preservation; when our European troops, of whose support under all circumstances we are alone sure, are so exceedingly limited in number and efficiency as to be of little avail against any extensive plan of insurrection; then indeed the truth of that expression of Sir John Malcolm is not without force: That in an empire like that of India, we are always in danger, and it is impossible to conjecture the form in which it may approach.19

Thus, while Bentinck made it abundantly clear in this same Minute that he believed that military authorities tended to greatly exaggerate the actual danger that existed in India he continued to dread the possibility of an unpredictable, unforeseeable catastrophe that could bring Company rule crashing to an end. Bentinck’s successor, Charles Metcalfe, made this point even more emphatically. ‘There cannot’, he wrote, ‘be a greater mistake than to imagine that our situation in India is without danger, or that our only danger is from distant enemies. . . Our danger is round about us, in the very heart of our own empire, and in every State of India’.20 Over the next several years, these more obscure trepidations about internal insurrection gave way to the more tangible and seemingly immediate threat posed by a possible Russian invasion via the NWF. During the Napoleonic era, concerns about a joint French and Russian invasion of India had prompted Governor-General Minto (1807–13) to seek

 PP, 1812–13 (122) VII.1, Minutes of Evidence Taken before the Committee of the Whole House, and the Select Committee on the Affairs of the East India Company, p. 56.  Minute by the Governor General and Commander in Chief on the Composition of the Army of India, 13 March 1835, PP, 1867 (500) LII.459, East India (European and Native Troops), p. 68. 20  Minute by the Governor General of India, 19 April 1835, ibid., p. 139. 18

19

An Empire Born in Crisis31

out strategic alliances with Persia, the Sikh kingdom in Punjab, and Afghanistan in an attempt to guard against this.21 Though the anticipated invasion never materialised, it marked the beginning of a sporadic yet protracted political rivalry between the British and Russians which came to be known as the ‘Great Game’.22 Subsequent events, including the Russo-Persian War (1826–8), the Russo-Turkish War (1828–9), and the publication of George de Lacy Evans’ alarming 1829 pamphlet, On the Practicability of an Invasion of British India, fanned the flames of Russophobia and convinced many that the Russians continued to pose a very real threat to British interests in India.23 Throughout the 1830s and 1840s, ambitious political officers in India seeking to advance their own careers – men like William Macnaghten and John Macneill – seized upon these renewed Russian fears to promote an aggressive ‘forward’ policy, and eventually managed to convince Governor-General Auckland (1836–42) that the only way to thwart Russian ambitions in Central Asia was through direct intervention in Afghanistan. As a result, in May of 1838, Auckland took the fateful decision to dispatch an army to invade Afghanistan and install the pro-British ruler, Shah Shuja. The First Anglo-Afghan War (1839–42) was one of the greatest British political and military disasters of the nineteenth century.24 In addition to the enormous human and financial costs, the annihilation of the Company’s army during its inglorious retreat from Kabul during the winter of 1842 shattered the image of British invincibility and weakened Britain’s position in India. If the mighty British Empire could be defeated and expelled from Afghanistan, then why not from India? Recognising the need to restore the appearance (or illusion) of British power and control, the newly-appointed Governor-General Ellenborough (1842–4) made it clear to his Commander-in-Chief (CINC), Jasper Nicholls, in March of 1842 that a swift and uncompromising response to the Afghan

 See M.E. Yapp, Strategies of British India: Britain, Iran and Afghanistan 1798–1850 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980).  While there is a voluminous literature on this subject – both popular and scholarly – it has engendered an intense debate over the extent to which certain aspects of the AngloRussian rivalry for control over Central Asia have been exaggerated and mythologised. See Malcolm Yapp, ‘The Legend of the Great Game’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 111 (2001): pp. 179–98; Edward Ingram, ‘Approaches to the Great Game in Asia’, Middle Eastern Studies, 18:4 (October 1982): pp. 449–57; Gerald Morgan, ‘Myth and Reality in the Great Game’, Asian Affairs, 4:1 (1973): pp. 55–65. 23  George de Lacy Evans, On the Practicability of an Invasion of British India; and of the Commercial and Financial Prospects and Resources of the Empire (London: J.M. Richardson, 1829). 24  For a recent account of this conflict, see William Dalrymple, Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan (London: Bloomsbury, 2013). 21

22

32

Colonial Insecurity in Early British India, 1757–1857

catastrophe was required. According to Ellenborough, it was imperative to restore our military reputation by the infliction of some signal and decisive blow upon the Affghans, which may make it appear to them, to our own subjects, and to our allies, that we have the power of inflicting punishment upon those who commit atrocities, and violate their faith, and that we withdraw ultimately from Affghanistan, not from any deficiency of means to maintain our position, but because we are satisfied that the King we have set up, has not, as we were erroneously led to imagine, the support of the nation over which he has been placed.25

A relief force dubbed the ‘Army of Retribution’ under the command of Major-General George Pollock subsequently cut a path of carnage and destruction across Afghanistan on their way to Kabul, where they eventually burned its iconic Grand Bazaar to the ground.26 Thus, aside from its clearly vindictive nature, we can see how there was also a deeply ­performative aspect to the violence perpetrated by the British forces. Indeed, the overall British response provides quite a vivid example of how colonial anxieties about appearing weak could induce colonial actors to commit terrible atrocities. Several years after the Company’s failure in Afghanistan, GovernorGeneral Henry Hardinge (1844–8) remarked how this one event had constituted ‘the greatest disaster and disgrace which our arms ever suffered, shaking this empire to its very foundation, lowering the prestige of British invincibility, elevating the hopes of our enemies, and loading the finances of the state with 30 millions of debt for the folly of such a political night-mare as a Russian invasion of India’.27 Though Hardinge was determined not to be drawn into costly and potentially disastrous military conflicts during his tenure in office, increasing political instability within the Sikh kingdom in Punjab following the death of Maharajah Ranjit Singh (1801–39) would lead the Company into two difficult and costly wars with the Sikhs. Although the British were ultimately triumphant in both of these conflicts, the Anglo-Sikh wars stretched the Company’s resources to its limits and revealed just how exposed and fragile the now overextended colonial regime had become. As we shall see below, the outbreak of the Second Anglo-Sikh War (1848–9) provided a particularly shocking blow to colonial confidence, and served as yet another

 Ellenborough to Nicolls, 15 March 1842, PP, 1843 (31) [428] XXXVII.1, Papers Relating to Military Operations in Afghanistan, no. 200, p. 167.  Dalrymple, Return of a King, pp. 456–66. 27  Hardinge to Lady Hardinge, 23–4 July 1847, in Bawa Satinder Singh (ed.), The Letters of the First Viscount Hardinge of Lahore to Lady Hardinge and Sir Walter and Lady James, 1844–1847 (London: Royal Historical Society, 1986), p. 227. 25

26

The Anglo-Sikh Wars33

sobering reminder that the British position in India ultimately remained quite ­vulnerable and exposed. 1.3

The Anglo-Sikh Wars

The Company and the Sikh kingdom first established formal diplomatic relations in 1809 with the signing of the Treaty of Amritsar. Through this treaty, the Company recognised Ranjit Singh as the sovereign ruler of Punjab and granted him the freedom to consolidate and expand his kingdom north of the Sutletj river, conveniently reducing the threat he posed to the Company’s own territories.28 Political relations between the Company and the Sikh kingdom thereafter were generally stable and friendly. Ranjit Singh was seen as a strong, capable ruler who could contain the naturally ‘warlike’ and ‘unruly’ nature of the Sikhs through sheer force of personality.29 After Ranjit Singh’s death in 1839, however, Company officials became increasingly circumspect about the possibility of the continued stability and peacefulness of the Sikh kingdom.30 As early as March of 1839, just before the commencement of the Afghan campaign, which depended in large part on the willing support of the Sikhs, Governor-General Auckland warned of the ‘serious hazard of the termination of that vigorous and united authority by which the Maharajah Runjeet Sing has maintained the tranquillity of the Punjab’.31 Auckland’s assessment proved correct, and over the next several years the Sikh kingdom was severely weakened by a series of internal power struggles. In 1843, after four previous claimants had already been assassinated, the five-year-old Maharajah Duleep Singh (1843–9) acceded to throne; his mother, Maharani Jind Kaur, became regent. Duleep Singh’s regime was never very stable, and his inability to maintain control over his chiefs or the increasingly independently-minded Khalsa army created a tense political situation with the Company. In the eyes of the Company, Punjab no longer had a legitimate or stable government that it could rely  J.S. Grewal, The Sikhs of the Punjab (1990; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 101. 29  During a diplomatic mission to Lahore in 1838, W.G. Osborne, the military secretary to Governor-General Auckland, was struck by the ruler’s ability to govern as ‘a despotic monarch over a turbulent and powerful nation’. W.G. Osborne, The Court and Camp of Runjeet Singh (London: Henry Colburn, 1840), p. 94. 30  According to W.H. Sleeman, the only thing that had kept the ‘predatory’ and warlike proclivities of the Sikh in check was the iron rule of Ranjit Singh: W.H. Sleeman, Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official, 2 vols. (London: J. Hatchard and Sons, 1844), vol. 1, pp. 386–7. 31  Auckland to the Secret Committee, 13 March 1839, PP, 1840 (9) XXXVII.137, Papers Relating to the War in Afghanistan, no. 1, p. 3. 28

34

Colonial Insecurity in Early British India, 1757–1857

on, and it began assembling a powerful army of 40,000 men along the Punjab frontier in order to protect its interests. In 1845, the Khalsa army responded to this military build-up by bolstering their own defences. The British protested and diplomatic relations broke down. When the Khalsa army began moving across the Sutlej in December of 1845, the Company finally declared war.32 The First Anglo-Sikh War (1845–6) was a hard-fought conflict, but the Company ultimately emerged victorious. The British victory allowed the Company to seize valuable Sikh territories, impose a massive war indemnity, and essentially reduce the Sikh kingdom to a client state by forcing the Lahore Durbar to accept a British Resident who would oversee the Company’s financial and political interests. Yet even though the Company was once again triumphant, Hardinge himself seemed unable to shake a nagging sense of doom about the entire affair. In what should have been the hour of his greatest triumph following the signing of the Treaty of Bhyrowal in December of 1846, Hardinge confided that: ‘In this country . . . the best plans may and do frequently fail from causes against barbarian powers which no foresight can anticipate. From week to week the most prudent man in so extensive an empire cannot c­ onjecture what may happen. Mutinies and conspiracies are always reported to be hatching and every detail from every quarter passes through my hands’.33 As we shall see, Hardinge’s trepidations about ‘mutinies and conspiracies’ would prove to be well-founded. On 18 April 1848, Patrick Vans Agnew and his assistant, Lieutenant William Anderson, arrived outside the heavily-fortified Punjabi city of Multan. The officers were sent there by the newly-appointed British Resident in Lahore, Frederick Currie, in order to transfer control of the city and its surrounding territories from the local ruler, Dewan Mulraj. Since its capture by Ranjit Singh in 1818, the rulers of Multan had been allowed to retain much of their autonomy in exchange for a generous tribute paid to the Sikh kingdom. In the years following Ranjit Singh’s death in 1839, however, Mulraj had begun withholding these payments. This did not sit well with the British authorities in Lahore, who insisted that he pay his arrears to the Durbar. After increasing pressure from the British and much prevarication, Mulraj eventually intimated his desire to retire from his position as ruler of Multan. For Currie, this presented a crucial opportunity to install a new governor who would be more amenable to the demands of the Durbar, a Sikh by the name of  For an overview, see Grewal, The Sikhs of the Punjab, chap. 6.  Hardinge to Lady James, 6 February 1847, in Singh, The Letters of the First Viscount Hardinge, p. 207.

32 33

The Anglo-Sikh Wars35

Sirdar Khan Singh. To ensure that British interests would be protected, Currie assigned Vans Agnew as Political Agent to Multan, and Anderson was placed in command of the military escort accompanying the British delegation to the city. Their mission was to effect a smooth and peaceful transfer of power, and to disband some of Mulraj’s local forces and replace them with new troops from Lahore.34 When the British delegation arrived outside the city, Mulraj greeted them with civility and courtesy, and seemed perfectly willing to surrender the city to them. ‘Everything’, Vans Agnew reported back to Lahore, ‘seems to bear out the character Mooltan has always borne for peace and quietness’.35 Despite its outward appearance of calm, however, Multan was actually rife with discontent and disaffection. Rumours had been circulating that the British intended to remove all of Mulraj’s officials from their positions, and many of the soldiers in the city’s garrison feared (quite rightly) that they would be disbanded and also lose their jobs. Evidently unaware of the tense situation that prevailed throughout Multan, the British officers set off for an inspection of the city’s fort the following morning, accompanied by both Khan Singh and Mulraj. After officiating over a small ceremony in which Mulraj surrendered official control of the fort over to Khan Singh, the British party exited through the Sikhi Gate. Just as they were crossing the drawbridge that extended over the fort’s ditch, one of Mulraj’s soldiers suddenly pushed his way through the British escort and stabbed Vans Agnew in the side with a spear. Vans Agnew was thrown from his horse, and before he had time to react, his attacker drew his sword and slashed him across the arm. Anderson, meanwhile, was rushed by a group of nearby soldiers and surrounded. Overwhelmed, Anderson was pulled from his horse and set upon by his assailants, who managed to inflict severe wounds to his forehead, back, and thigh. In spite of the chaos, Khan Singh quickly managed to rally the mounted escort and fend off the attackers in time to rescue the wounded British officers. Battered and bloodied, the British party made their way back to the Eid Gah Mosque just outside the city, where they had camped the previous night. Shortly after returning to the camp, Vans Agnew despatched a brief report of the incident addressed to Currie, urgently requesting immediate assistance.36 Despite the gravity of the situation, Vans Agnew remained remarkably optimistic. Not only was he convinced that Mulraj had nothing to do with the attack, but he also believed that it was still possible to  Letter no. 43 from Governor-General Dalhousie to the Secret Committee, 11 May 1848, PP, 1849 (1071) XLI.1, Papers Relating to the Punjab, 1847–1849, no. 26, p. 119. 35  Vans Agnew to Currie, 14 April 1848, ibid., p. 131. 36  Vans Agnew to Currie, 19 April 1848, ibid., pp. 131–2. 34

36

Colonial Insecurity in Early British India, 1757–1857

win back the support of the mutinous garrison and salvage the situation. Vans Agnew’s optimism would prove to be fatally ill-founded. During the night, a large number of the Durbar troops who made up the British escort deserted, and the camp was bombarded the following morning by artillery mounted along the nearby city walls. Finally, just after nightfall on 20 April, a large band of Multani soldiers attacked and overran the British encampment. Khan Singh was taken prisoner, and Vans Agnew and Anderson were both killed and beheaded. Their bodies were then reportedly mutilated ‘in the most barbarous manner’.37 Although there is no evidence to suggest that Mulraj had anything to do with the initial assault outside the fort, the brutal killing of two British officers essentially gave him no choice but to reluctantly assume command of what had now become an open rebellion against British authority. When details of the events at Multan emerged, the British colonial establishment in Punjab was shocked and visibly shaken. Not only had two of their officers been betrayed and brutally murdered, but an Indian ruler was now leading an open revolt that had the potential spill over and consume the rest of the province. In a letter to Governor-General Dalhousie (1848–56) on 24 April, Currie stressed that it was imperative that this ‘outrage’ be punished as swiftly and severely as possible, lest it become a focal point for further acts of resistance: There are many thousand dissatisfied and discontented spirits throughout the Punjab quiet, while all around them is quiet, but watching an opportunity for revolt and disturbance. A successful rebellion in Mooltan, which this affair, if not immediately put down, will become, would kindle a flame through the land, which it would be very difficult to extinguish.38

In addition to concerns that various chiefs throughout the province and even the Afghans might seize upon any sign of British weakness or ­hesitation, Currie was particularly anxious that the fragile peace that ­prevailed in Punjab’s strategic and politically important Majha region might collapse. Teeming with disgruntled soldiers who had recently been disbanded from the once-mighty Khalsa army, the Majha was the political heartland of the Sikh kingdom and had already provided fertile ground for various rumours and prophecies about an imminent uprising that would expel the British and restore the former glory of Sikh rule.39 Mulraj, Currie feared, would be seen as the foretold leader who would lead this revolt.40 According to John Lawrence, Currie’s immediate predecessor

 Statement of Jemadar Kesra Sing, ibid., p. 135.  Currie to Dalhousie, 24 April 1848, ibid., p. 137.  Currie to the GOI, 6 April 1848, ibid., p. 127. 40  Currie to Dalhousie, 27 April 1848, ibid., p. 141. 37 38 39

The Anglo-Sikh Wars37

Figure 1.1  James Andrew Broun Ramsay, 1st Marquess of Dalhousie ‘Portrait by Sir John Watson-Gordon, 1847. © National Portrait Gallery, London’.

and now Commissioner and Superintendent of the Trans-Sutlej States, if the British did not act promptly and decisively, ‘the whole of the disbanded soldiery of the Manjha will flock down and make common cause with the mutineers’.41  R. Bosworth Smith, The Life of Lord Lawrence, 2 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1883), vol. 1, p. 225.

41

38

Colonial Insecurity in Early British India, 1757–1857

As the British feared, news of the uprising in Multan spread quickly throughout Punjab, triggering a wave of disaffection and revolt. In May, there was an attempt to foment a mutiny among the Indian troops ­stationed at Lahore. Though the plot was foiled, it implicated a number of prominent political figures, including the deposed Maharani Jind Kaur. While they were unable to prove it, British officials strongly suspected that the Maharani had some connection to the rebels in ­ Multan. Fearing that she might serve as a rallying symbol for further resistance, the British exiled her from Punjab, but this only served to further inflame anti-­British hostility.42 Meanwhile, in the Majha, a Sikh religious leader named Bhai Maharaj Singh was attracting increasing numbers of followers as he travelled the countryside preaching rebellion and a return to Khalsa rule.43 For James Abbott, the Assistant to the Resident in Hazara, all of this was ample confirmation of his own longheld suspicions about the existence of a carefully orchestrated and concerted Sikh plot to overthrow British rule.44 Like Currie and Lawrence, Abbott felt that if the British did not suppress this uprising quickly, the entire basis of their rule would be undermined and imperilled: Delay, when a fearful and instant retribution is everywhere expected, will be attributed to timidity. We hold our position in the Punjaub wholly by the force of opinion, by the general belief in our superior courage and resources. Our Empire in India has the same foundation, and one or both may pass away if we evince any symptoms of hesitation. By delay, every traitor from the snowy mountains to the Sutlej will have time to complete his web.45

Over the next several months, the British struggled to retain control over their increasingly mutinous Sikh regiments, while many of their allies declared against them and entered into open revolt.46 The final great blow came in September 1848, when the forces under the command of Raja Sher Singh that had been despatched by Currie to assist Herbert  Currie to the GOI, 15 May 1848, PP, 1849 (1071) XLI.1, Papers Relating to the Punjab, 1847–1849, no. 27, pp. 167–8; Currie to the GOI, 16 May 1848, ibid., pp. 168–9. 43  Repeated failures to capture Maharaj Singh led British authorities to conclude that he was receiving aid and assistance from a large section of the rural population, including village headmen and local rulers: Currie to the GOI, 13 June 1848, ibid., no. 29, pp. 210–11. 44  Abbott undoubtedly exaggerated the extent of this plot. His diary entries between May and early August 1848 are replete with references to all sorts of alleged conspiracies, and read like the anxious and paranoid ravings of a clearly unsettled mind: see A. Raynor (ed.), Journals and Diaries of the Assistants to the Agent, Governor-General NorthWest Frontier and Resident at Lahore 1846–1849 (Allahabad: The Pioneer Press, 1911), pp. 173–220. 45  Ibid., pp. 165–6. 46  Currie to Gough, 12 September 1848, PP, 1849 (1071) XLI.1, Papers Relating to the Punjab, 1847–1849, no. 38, p. 349. 42

The Anglo-Sikh Wars39

Edwardes in the siege of Multan switched sides.47 In a fiery proclamation, Sher Singh declared his intention to restore Maharajah Duleep Singh to his rightful place and ‘eradicate and expel the tyrannous and crafty Feringees’.48 Now outnumbered and with the monsoon rains quickly approaching, the remaining British troops were forced into an ignominious and ‘embarrassing’ withdrawal, giving Mulraj and the other rebel forces across the country time to fortify their position and gather more support.49 It was not until five months later, after the monsoon had ended, that the British were finally able to launch a full-scale reprisal against the rebellious Sikh kingdom. ‘I have drawn the sword, and this time thrown away the scabbard’, Dalhousie famously declared. ‘If the Sikhs, after this is over, rise again, they shall intrench themselves behind a dunghill, and fight with their finger-nails, for if I live 12 months they shall have nothing else left to fight with’.50 True to his word, Dalhousie inflicted a crushing defeat against the Sikh kingdom in what came to be known as the Second Anglo-Sikh War (1848–9). The resounding British victory enabled Dalhousie to formally annex Punjab into British India, and removed the last great indigenous power capable of posing any real military threat to British interests in the subcontinent. Because of this, it is sometimes easy to forget just how tenuous, uncertain, and vulnerable the British position was at the outset of this conflict. However, when we move beyond the obvious bluster and bravado expressed by Dalhousie, an altogether different image of the colonial situation in India emerges. Whether it was the concern evinced about the need to preserve the illusion of British superiority and invincibility, the fevered paranoia about ‘native’ plots and conspiracies, or the very real threat posed by their own soldiers and allies turning against them, the British colonial establishment appears to have been acutely aware of its own vulnerability on the eve of the Second Anglo-Sikh War. This was neither the first nor the last time that an impending sense of danger and insecurity would wrack the colonial administration in India. Indeed, one of the essential features of the colonial condition in India was an acute awareness of its own frailty, and a profound sense of systematic insecurity. Far from being inevitable, the British rise to power in India, as we have seen, was a hard-fought and fiercely contested affair. As several scholars

 Edwardes to Currie, 14 September 1848, ibid., pp. 357–8.  Dalhousie to the Secret Committee, 7 October 1848, ibid., p. 336. 49  Ibid. 50  J.G.A. Baird (ed.), Private Letters of the Marquess of Dalhousie (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1910), pp. 34–5. 47 48

40

Colonial Insecurity in Early British India, 1757–1857

have pointed out, the Company’s internecine wars with the subcontinent’s Mughal successor states helped give birth to a ‘garrison state’ in India, where military and security concerns came to dominate the political machinery of the colonial government.51 As a result, the military not only became the premier institution when it came to allocating the resources of the colonial state but it also came to be seen as the primary guarantor of the Company’s continued survival. As Hugh Gough, the CINC during the First Anglo-Sikh War, put it to a Parliamentary Select Committee in March of 1853: ‘India is a very peculiar country; you do not know the hour when some outbreak may take place; and we all know that the people of India have their heads up like so many leeches looking out for anything that may occur. Therefore, I think that a reduction of the army to any extent would be injudicious’.52 Gough’s position was quite typical of the military establishment, but his ability to persuade his superiors was made possible only because of a wide consensus among both civilian and military officials that India was, as Malcolm claimed, always in a state of danger. The following section examines how this culture of colonial insecurity was propagated and sustained through the re-writing of Indian history and the concomitant re-imagining of India as a place of permanent peril, disorder, and danger. 1.4

Colonial Knowledge and ‘Military Despotism’

Threatened on all sides, the Company looked to its military forces as the ultimate guarantors of its security in India. In many ways, however, it was the military establishment itself that had one of the strongest interests in promoting an image of continual Company vulnerability and danger.

 Douglas M. Peers, Between Mars and Mammon: Colonial Armies and the Garrison State in India 1819–1835 (London: Tauris, 1995); Stig Förster, Die Mächtigen Diener der East India Company: Ursachen und Hintergründe der Britischen Expansionspolitik in Südasien, 1793–1819 (Stuttgard: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1992). Numerous other historians, including C.A. Bayly and David Washbrook, have pointed out that the Company’s territorial expansion was driven forward by a policy of ‘military-fiscalism’ – the mutually reinforcing relationship between the maximisation of land revenue and the projection of increasing amounts of military power: C.A. Bayly, ‘The British Military-Fiscal State and Indigenous Resistance, India 1750–1820’, in Lawrence Stone (ed.), An Imperial State at War (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 325; D.A. Washbrook, ‘India, 1818–1860: The Two Faces of Colonialism’, in Andrew Porter (ed.), Oxford History of the British Empire, 5 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), vol. 3, p. 401; Marshall, ‘Reappraisal’, pp. 72–3. For more on the relationship between military-fiscalism and state-building, see John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688–1783 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990). 52  PP, 1852–3 (426) XXVII.1, First Report from the Select Committee on Indian Territories; Together with the Minutes of Evidence, and Appendix, para. 1691, p. 116.

51

Colonial Knowledge and ‘Military Despotism’41

The Company’s dependence on military power, as we have seen above, meant that the army was able to exert a stranglehold over the colonial state’s finances. At the same time, the continued uncertainty of Company rule meant that military officers were also able to carve out prominent positions for themselves within the political, intellectual, and institutional worlds of the colonial establishment.53 As a result, military language, ideas, and priorities came to dominate not only the political agenda, but also the very ways in which colonial administrators – both civilian and military alike – responded to and framed problems of Indian governance. Military men used their considerable influence to depict India as a place of constant turbulence, danger, and crisis in order to advance their careers. Through the (re)writing of Indian history, these officers succeeded in creating a popular and enduring image that India was an inherently warlike, factious, and disorderly land that was ideally suited to the strong-handed and despotic administration of soldiers – a theory of government that might be best described as ‘military despotism’. At the turn of the nineteenth century, the vast majority of Company employees in India were military officers.54 Half a century later, threequarters of the nearly 50,000 Europeans in India were still soldiers.55 In the absence of the more well-developed civilian and mercantile interests that dominated the political oligarchy of metropolitan Britain, military officers rose to particular prominence within the colonial administration.56 Due to a lack of sufficient numbers of trained civilian officers, the Company’s administration in India became deeply reliant on the use of military officers from the regular army who were seconded, either temporarily or permanently, into civil employ with the Indian Political Service, the Company’s diplomatic corps in the early nineteenth ­century. These ‘political officers’ – or ‘politicals’ as they were often called – served as ministers, envoys, residents, and political agents in strategically important border areas where colonial control was at its weakest. In other instances, these officers travelled with the Company’s armies as they marched on campaign in order to negotiate treaties and settlements with the various groups and rulers they encountered. As such, these officers had a profound amount of influence

 Douglas M. Peers, ‘State, Power, and Colonialism’, in Douglas M. Peers and Nandini Gooptu (eds.), India and the British Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp.  16–43; Douglas M. Peers, ‘Colonial Knowledge and the Military in India, 1780– 1860’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 33:2 (May 2005): pp. 157–80. 54  Förster, Die Mächtigen Diener, p. 75. 55  Douglas M. Peers, ‘Conquest Narratives: Romanticism, Orientalism and Intertextuality in the Indian Writings of Sir Walter Scott and Robert Orme’, in Michael J. Franklin (ed.), Romantic Representations of British India (London: Routledge, 2006), p. 239. 56  Förster, Die Mächtigen Diener, p. 75. 53

42

Colonial Insecurity in Early British India, 1757–1857

when it came to determining the course of the Company’s foreign policy.57 While some military officers were appointed to these civil posts as a result of patronage and venality, the vast majority were given these positions because they possessed the requisite linguistic, technical, or scientific skills as a result of both their military training and their years of experience of serving in India.58 The political predominance of military officers in India was such that Sir James Weir Hogg, a chairman of the EIC, was able to confidently declare in a speech to the graduating class of the Company’s military seminary at Addiscombe in 1846 that ‘The highest political, as well as military employments, are open to the army’.59 Those officers who remained in the army proper were no political slouches either. As a predominantly ‘middle class army’, the Company’s armies in India were professionalised to a much greater degree than any other British military force during this period.60 This gave its officers a stronger sense of their own corporate interests and belonging, and meant that they were much more politicised and anxious to press their own professional claims into the political agenda of the colonial state.61 Stig Förster, for example, has demonstrated how military officers used their formidable influence within the political machinery of the colonial state to press security issues to the fore, and actively promoted an aggressive policy of territorial expansion through military conquest in order to enlarge their realms of influence and careers.62 Soldiers who backed wars stood to gain greatly from the prize money they managed to plunder while on campaign, not to mention the opportunity to make a name for themselves and cover themselves in glory.63 The CINC of the Company’s armies in India, moreover, occupied one of the highest positions in British India as a member of  Yapp, Strategies of British India, p. 9.  Peers, ‘Colonial Knowledge and the Military’, p. 159. 59  James Weir Hogg, Addresses Delivered by Sir James Weir Hogg, Bar., M.P., Chairman of the East-India Company, to the Students of the East-India College, at Haileybury, and to the Cadets at the Military Seminary, at Addiscombe, on the Closing of the Half-Yearly Terms, 1846 (London: J. & H. Cox, 1846), p. 40. 60  P.J. Marshall, The Making and Unmaking of Empires: Britain, India, and America c. ­1750–1783 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 222. 61  See Hew Strachan, The Politics of the British Army (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), pp.  78–80; Stephen P. Cohen, The Indian Army: Its Contribution to the Development of a Nation (1971; Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990); Förster, Die Mächtigen Diener, p. 75 and Peers, ‘Colonial Knowledge and the Military’, p. 163. 62  See Förster, Die Mächtigen Diener, esp. pp. 75–7. The Curzon-Kitchener conflict of the first decade of the twentieth century provides another famous example of the uncomfortable relationship that existed between India’s civilian government and an over-­ powerful military establishment: see David Gilmour, Curzon (London: John Murray, 1994), pp. 251–5, 296–317. 63  Lawrence James, Raj: The Making and Unmaking of British India (London: Little, Brown and Company, 1997), p. 74. 57 58

Colonial Knowledge and ‘Military Despotism’43

the Governor-General’s Council, thus ensuring that the military interests were always strongly represented at the centre of policy-making. It is important to point out that there were significant political cleavages that existed between soldiers who joined the political service and those who remained within the army proper.64 The former were often younger officers who had sidestepped the traditional route of promotion through seniority practiced in the army, and instead joined the political corps for fast advancement.65 Political officers had usually only served briefly with their regiments and required no specialised qualification, aside from passing an interpreter’s exam, before being transferred to the Political Department. Once there, they were often able to exercise power comparable to that of a general, despite still being younger grade officers.66 Military officers who remained within the army proper, on the other hand, were career men who typically resented the fact that ­political officers had circumvented the system of promotion through seniority and were sometimes even able to exercise direct control over more senior commanding officers.67 Recalling both the disaster in Afghanistan and the series of debacles leading to the outbreak of the Second AngloSikh War, former CINC Charles Napier (1849–51) lambasted political officers such as Macnagthen and Currie for ignoring the counsel of their more experienced army officers.68 Although Napier was one of the outspoken and vitriolic critics of the Indian Political Service and civilian rule in India more generally, he was equally critical of political officers who came from the army, particularly James Outram, who had served under him during his tenure as the military governor of Sindh between 1843 and 1847.69 ‘Many are the examples of danger from divided power in  There was also a third type of military officer in India: those who served with the Crown forces and commanded European soldiers. Unlike the Company’s army officers, however, these officers were never permanently stationed in India, and usually only served there for between a year and a year and a half. These Crown officers, in general, were much less knowledgeable about India than their Company counterparts, and were not nearly as prolific when it came to writing about Indian affairs and politics. 65  Strachan, Politics of the British Army, p. 81. 66  Ibid. 67  As CINC, Charles Napier was highly critical of political officers and their tendency to interfere in military matters. He blamed political officers for both the disaster at Kabul during the First Anglo-Afghan war, as well as the mutiny of the Sikh army at Multan that sparked the Second Anglo-Sikh War. See Charles James Napier, Defects, Civil and Military of the Indian Government (London: Charles Westerton, 1853), p. 222. Edward Thackwell similarly criticised Major Frederick Makeson, the political agent to Governor-General Dalhousie, for his interference in the military operations conducted against the Sikhs during the Second Anglo-Sikh War: Edward Joseph Thackwell, Narrative of the Second Seikh War in 1848–1849 (London: Richard Bentley, 1851), pp. 250–1. 68  Napier, Defects, Civil and Military, p. 222. 69  Ibid. 64

44

Colonial Insecurity in Early British India, 1757–1857

war from the pernicious interference of civil authorities’, Napier wrote, ‘and also of military men invested with civil power – politicals’.70 Edward Thackwell, who served during the Second Anglo-Sikh War, issued a ­ similar protest with regard to the interference of Major Frederick Mackeson, who served as political agent to Dalhousie throughout the campaign. Though Thackwell was a personal acquaintance of Mackeson and actually praised his talent and abilities, he nonetheless concluded his Narrative of the Second SeikhWar (1851) with ‘a solemn protest against the system of hampering the Commander-in-Chief with political agents’.71 Despite their indisputable differences, both sides had a vested interest in promoting an image of colonial insecurity and vulnerability. Intrigues and dangers on the fringes of British rule meant that political officers could often secure greater resources and expand their realms of influence. Alternatively, the military menace posed by foreign powers, the threat of internal insurrection, or the mere exigencies of collecting revenue and enforcing the Company’s will72 meant that career military officers could be assured of increased pay during times of active service, prize money, and an opportunity to increase their honour and reputation. One of the most common ways in which both political officers and career soldiers attempted to advance their own interests was through their contributions to India’s burgeoning print culture. Over the course of their careers many of these officers made substantial contributions to the philological, historical, and scientific study of India, dating as far back as the late eighteenth century when they had a near monopoly on much of the orientalist scholarship that was produced.73 Covering a wide range of topics including the history, geography, climate, cultures, and languages of India, these early pioneering efforts were important in establishing the intellectual legitimacy and importance of military men within ­colonial society. These officers were also important contributors to various non-specialised interest periodicals, such as Blackwood’s Magazine, the Edinburgh Review, Fraser’s Magazine, Mofussilite, the Delhi Gazette, the Meerut Universal Review, and the Calcutta Review.74  Ibid., p. 221.   ‘The mischief, of which the political agents have been productive, is prodigious, he wrote. ‘Formerly officers in command of armies were vested with political powers. Agents were attached to troops; but they were always subordinate to the General. In short, they were merely officers experienced in the habits of the country, who were at hand to offer advice when wanted’: Thackwell, Narrative of the Second Seikh War, pp. 250–1. 72  See Lees, ‘A “Tranquil Spectator”’, pp. 1–19; David Arnold, Police Power and Colonial Rule: Madras 1859–1947 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 15. 73  Peers, ‘Colonial Knowledge and the Military’, pp. 158–9. 74  T.R. Moreman, ‘The Army in India, and the Military Periodical Press, 1830–98’, in David Finklestein and Douglas M. Peers (eds.), Negotiating India in the NineteenthCentury Media (London: Macmillan, 2000), p. 211. 70

71

Colonial Knowledge and ‘Military Despotism’45

Because military personnel constituted the single largest community of print culture consumers in British India at this time, they were more easily able to embed themselves into and shape the intellectual currents of the subcontinent.75 The authority of these military officers derived from the fact that they often presented themselves as the foremost ‘experts’ on India. As opposed to policy-makers back home in Britain or those Company officials nestled in the safety of imperial power centres like Calcutta that were far removed from the harsh colonial frontier, military officers argued that they were uniquely situated to understand India and Indian society due to the unique nature of their careers. Political officers stationed in foreign residencies, for example, could claim exclusive insight into the social, cultural, and political workings of these powers.76 Career military officers, on the other hand, had the opportunity to travel all over India with an army that recruited vast numbers of indigenous soldiers and helped construct strategic railways, canals, and cantonment towns. All of this lent a certain amount of perceived legitimacy to the claim that they were more well integrated with and attuned to the opinions of local populations than other colonial institutions that operated more indirectly.77 Among the most powerful and enduring beliefs perpetuated by these so-called experts was the perception that India was a place of constant danger, disorder, and war. Alexander Dow’s History of Hindostan (1768– 72) and Mark Wilks’ Historical Sketches (1810–17), for instance, were two major early works that helped establish and reinforce the belief that the history of India was primarily that of successive military conquests and destructive internal revolutions and conflicts.78 According to Dow: Hindostan, in every age, was an ample field for private ambition, and for public tyranny. At one time we see a petty Omrah starting forth, and wading through an ocean of blood to the crown. . . At another time we meet the Kings, from a lust of power which defeats itself, destroying those subjects over whom they only wished to tyrannize.79  Peers, ‘Colonial Knowledge and the Military’, pp. 158–9.  A Late Assistant Resident, ‘The Nepaulese Mission with some Account of the Kingdom of Nepaul, Her Chiefs, Inhabitants, Production, &c.’, Colburn’s United Service Magazine, 260 (1850): pp. 329–30. 77  Tan Tai Yong, The Garrison State:The Military, Government and Society in Colonial Punjab, 1849–1947 (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2005), p. 25. As one officer put it, ‘To understand either the language of the inhabitants . . . or the ways and habits of the natives of India, a long residence among them is necessary, and also a disposition on the party of aliens to consider the country as . . . a home’: Anon, ‘Legislation for India’, Colburn’s United Service Magazine, 370 (1859): p. 106. 78  Alexander Dow, The History of Hindostan; from the Earliest Account of Time, to the Death of Akbar, 3 vols. (London: T. Becket and P.A. de Hondt, 1768, 1772); Mark Wilks, Historical Sketches of the South of India in an Attempt to Trace the History of Mysore: From the Origin of the Hindoo Government of the State, to the Extinction of the Mohammedan Dynasty in 1799, 3 vols. (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees and Orme, 1810, 1817). 79  Dow, The History of Hindostan, vol. 1, p. xiii. 75 76

46

Colonial Insecurity in Early British India, 1757–1857

Wilks’ work, in particular, was widely admired and read in his time, and quickly became one of the standard texts for students of Indian history and the rise of Company rule.80 Wilks asserted that even before the Mughal, Persian, and Durrani invasions during the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, India’s history had been dominated by internecine wars of conquest and insurrection. ‘At periods long antecedent to the Mohammedan invasion’, he wrote, ‘wars, revolutions, and conquests seem to have followed each other, in a succession more strangely complex, rapid, and destructive, as the events more deeply recede into the gloom of antiquity’.81 While Wilks’ and Dow’s work laid the foundations for depictions of Indian society as warlike and backward which would later come to dominate British understandings of Indian history, numerous subsequent works built upon and reinforced these ideas. In 1829, James Tod published the first volume of his Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan, which presented the history of the Rajput states of North-Western India.82 Though it initially received mixed reviews, Tod’s Annals went on to become one of the most re-printed and celebrated histories of this period.83 Interestingly enough, Tod felt compelled to begin this work by addressing the commonly held British assumption that India lacked any proper indigenous historical record of its own. According to Tod, the apparent dearth of Indian literary and learned texts was the direct result of the numerous ‘political changes and convulsions’ that had wracked the subcontinent since as far back as the invasion of Mahmud of Ghazni in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries.84 In the absence of conventional sources, Tod encouraged the British to look instead to the Puranas (ancient religious texts on Hindu mythology), royal genealogies, and even the works of poets for hints about the Indian past.85 But although Tod considered

 Sudipta Sen, Distant Sovereignty: National Imperialism and the Origins of British India (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 50–1. Wilks had capitalised on the fact that he had participated in a number of the campaigns he described in his history, including the war against Tipu Sultan, in order to bolster his claims of expertise on the subject of Indian history: Wilks, Historical Sketches, vol. 1, p. ix. According to the famous politician and historian Sir James Mackintosh, Wilks’ book was ‘the first example of a book on Indian history founded on a critical examination of testimony and probability, and from which the absurdities of fable and etymology [were] banished’: Robert James Mackintosh (ed.), Memoirs of the Life of the Right Honourable Sir James Mackintosh, 2 vols. (London: Edward Moxon, 1836), vol. 2, p. 69. 81  Wilks, Historical Sketches, vol. 1, p. 2. 82  James Tod, Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan; or the Central and Western Rajput States of India, William Crooke (ed.), 3 vols. (1829–32; London: Oxford University Press, 1920). 83  See Norbert Peabody, ‘Tod’s Rajast’han and the Boundaries of Imperial Rule in Nineteenth-Century India’, Modern Asian Studies, 30:1 (1996): pp. 185–220. 84  Tod, Annals and Antiquities, vol. 1, pp. lv–lvi. 85  Ibid., p. lviii. 80

Colonial Knowledge and ‘Military Despotism’47

poets and bards to be ‘the primitive historians of mankind’, he also wistfully noted how their stories were written for ‘the amusement of a warlike race’, who took little interest in civil or peaceful matters.86 Thus, even while it presented a generally sympathetic portrait of the Rajputs, Tod’s work made it clear that these were a warlike and turbulent people, prone to internal disorders and revolutions. For many observers, India’s tumultuous ancient history served as a convenient explanation for the continued insecurity and dangers that plagued contemporary Indian society. Philip Meadows Taylor’s highly sensationalist Confessions of a Thug (1839), for example, drew a direct link between the historic inability of Indian rulers to control their warlike and predatory subjects with the purported existence of the thuggee murder cult.87 Though Taylor’s work was a largely fictional and had little factual value, its imaginative and titillating account of the exotic dangers that lurked around every corner in India found a ready audience within both India and metropolitan Britain.88 Five years after Taylor published his book, the man who actually became famous for the suppression of thuggee, W.H. Sleeman, published his Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official (1844). In it, he presented an image of India as a place that was teeming with groups of people with warlike and ‘predatory’ predilections: There are, in all parts of India, thousands and tens of thousands who have lived by the sword, or who wish to live the sword, but cannot find employment suited to their tastes. These would all flock to the standard of the first lawless chief who could offer them a fair prospect of plunder; and to them all wars and rumours of wars are delightful. The moment they hear of a threatened invasion from the north-west, they whet their swords, and look fiercely around upon those from whose breasts they are ‘to cut their pound of flesh’.89

 Ibid., p. lx.  ‘In a vast continent like India’, he wrote, ‘which from the earliest periods has been portioned out into territories, the possessions of many princes and chieftains – each with supreme and irresponsible power in his own dominions, having most lax and inefficient governments, and at enmity with or jealous of his neighbours, – it may be conceived that no security could exist for the traveller upon the principal roads throughout the continent; no general league was ever entered into for his security; nor could any government, however vigorous, or system of police, however vigilant it might be in one state, possibly extend to all’: Philip Meadows Taylor, Confessions of a Thug, Nick Mirsky (ed.) (1839; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 1–2. For a deconstruction of the myth of Thuggee, see Wagner, Thuggee. 88  Decades later, Taylor also wrote his own history of India entitled A Student’s Manual of the History of India (1870), which presented an altogether similar picture of Indian history to that of Dow, Wilks, and Tod: Philip Meadows Taylor, A Student’s Manual of the History of India: From the Earliest Period to the Present (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1870). 89  Sleeman, Rambles and Recollections, vol. 1, pp. 477–8. Sleeman’s observation about ­surplus military labour in India during this period was no doubt in part due to the disruptive influence of the Company’s own selective recruiting and demobilisation 86 87

48

Colonial Insecurity in Early British India, 1757–1857

In the North-Western Provinces, Awadh, and the Central Provinces, where Sleeman spent most of his career, he presented a picture of almost constant strife and warfare between local elites and the central ­authorities before the stabilising intervention of the British.90 Caught between these pointless and internecine elite power struggles, Sleeman concluded that India’s village communities had been forged to weather the storms of both foreign invasion and nearly constant civil war.91 Although these stereotypical depictions of India as a place teeming with predatory and bloodthirsty marauders became a powerful trope within the colonial imagination, they were never absolute and actually competed alongside other essentialising discourses that instead emphasised the passivity and weakness of Indians. According to Robert Orme’s highly influential A History of the Military Transactions of the British Nation in Indostan (1763, 1778), Indians were essentially ‘­merchants’, more interested in accumulating wealth than in fighting wars.92 Hindus, and especially Bengalis, were often derided for being ‘soft’, ‘passive’, and ‘effete’.93 As Mounstuart Elphinstone declared in his History of British India (1841), ‘Their great defect is a want of manliness.’94 Indian domestic servants, moreover, were frequently scorned by their employers for being lazy, submissive, and cowardly.95 Another common view held that South Indians were somehow less warlike than their northern

practices: see Dirk H.A. Kolff, Naukar, Rajput and Sepoy: The Ethnohistory of the Military Labour Market in Hindustan, 1450–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990) and Seema Alavi, The Sepoys and the Company: Tradition and Transition in Northern India 1770–1830 (1995; Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006). 90  Sleeman, Rambles and Recollections, vol. 1, pp. 187–9. 91  Ibid., p. 469. 92  ‘They have from time immemorial’, he wrote, ‘been as addicted to commerce, as they are averse to war. They have therefore always been immensely rich, and have always remained incapable of defending their wealth’: Robert Orme, ‘A Dissertation on the Establishments Made by Mahomedan Conquerors of Indostan’, in A History of the Military Transactions of the British Nation in Indostan: from theYear MDCCXLV. To Which is Prefixed a Dissertation on the Establishments Made by Mahomedan Conquerors in Indostan, 2 vols. (1763; London: John Nourse, 1778), vol. 1, p. 8. 93  See Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The ‘Manly Englishman’ and the ‘Effeminate Bengali’ in the Late Nineteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), p. 15. 94  ‘Their slavish constitution’, he continued, ‘their blind superstition, their extravagant mythology, the subtilties [sic] and verbal distinctions of their philosophy, the language softness of their poetry, their effeminate manners, their love of artifice and delay, their submissive temper, their dread of change . . . are so many proofs of the absence of the more robust qualities of disposition and intellect throughout the mass of the nation’: Mountstuart Elphinstone, The History of India, 2 vols. (London: John Murray, 1841), vol. 1, p. 374. 95  See, for example, Julia Charlotte Maitland, Letters from Madras, During the Years ­1836–1839 (London: John Murray, 1846).

Colonial Knowledge and ‘Military Despotism’49

counterparts.96 Yet even these supposedly docile and feeble subjects were a source of concern for their colonial overlords. Commenting on the Santhal Rebellion in Bengal in 1855, Dalhousie remarked how even the ‘gentlest’ and ‘weakest’ elements of Indian society were volatile and prone to revolt, and that the British needed to maintain a constant vigilance in order to guard against this.97 Indeed, many British observers believed that in order to compensate for their want of manliness and courage, Indians were crafty, treacherous, and ruthless. As Ranajit Guha has pointed out, the conquest of India allowed the British to initiate another sort of conquest: the conquest of the pen through the re-writing of Indian history.98 In the hands of soldiers, this pen re-wrote the history of India as a series of wars, revolutions, and military contests. This, in turn, provided an ontological explanation ­ of how the social and cultural world of India was constituted. India’s dark and troubled past was the direct cause of the continued instability, strife, and danger that still permeated the subcontinent, which, in turn, required the strong, guiding hand of soldiers to ensure its safety and security. Malcolm’s writings on India and his emphasis on the need to maintain a strong military establishment, for instance, were deeply ­influenced by the trajectory of his career from soldier to diplomat and administrator.99 Tod’s Annals was similarly influenced by his appointment as the Company’s first Political Resident to the western Rajput states following the decisive defeat of the Marathas in 1818. With the Maratha threat removed, Tod looked warily towards Ranjit Singh’s Sikh kingdom, the emirs of Sindh and Afghanistan, the kingdom of Nepal, and even the Russians as potential military threats who could be best contained if the Company was to maintain the autonomy of the Rajput princes and use them as buffer states.100 Soldiers – whether they were political officers or career officers – were the primary beneficiaries of an  The proliferation of the so-called ‘martial races’ theory from the 1880s onwards added yet another dimension to these discourses by attempting to ‘scientifically’ delineate between groups who were considered masculine and warlike, and those were believed to be weak and effeminate: David Omissi, The Sepoy and the Raj: The Indian Army, ­1860–1940 (Hampshire: Macmillan, 1994), p. 12. 97  Baird, Private Letters of the Marquess of Dalhousie, p. 351. 98  Ranajit Guha, Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), p. xiv. Guha, along with many others, including Bernard Cohn, have persuasively argued that this appropriation of Indian history enabled the British to create an image of India that served as the ideological justification for the imposition and continuance of colonial rule: Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge. 99  Harrington, Sir John Malcolm. 100  Tod, Annals and Antiquities, vol. 1, pp. 146–50; Peabody, ‘Tod’s Rajast’han’, pp. 202, 207–8. 96

50

Colonial Insecurity in Early British India, 1757–1857

insecure and uncertain future of the Company in India, and used this to their advantage in order to advance their own careers. The mutually reinforcing beliefs that India was an inherently militarised society and that its security was always in doubt were foundational to the emergence of a form of government best described as ‘military despotism’. Since the eighteenth century, Company officials in India had concluded that India had long been ruled by despots, and used this particular historical interpretation to legitimise their own ‘benevolent’ form of despotic rule over the subcontinent.101 Based in large part on the early writings of Montesquieu and Dow, and later solidified in James Mill’s infamous History of British India (1817), the theory of ‘oriental despotism’ provided a sort of ‘moral endorsement’ of the Company’s rule based on Britain’s supposedly higher level of civilisational development, and the need for India to be guided by a firm hand to accelerate it on the path of development.102 Not all forms of despotism, however, were considered legitimate in the eyes of the Company. For example, they initially attempted to construct their despotic authority in India by tying it to the ‘legitimate’ despotism of the Mughals, which had been eroded during the breakup up the Mughal Empire, when provincial governors and other local rulers had seized ‘illegitimate’ despotic power for themselves.103 The Company then once more differentiated its own form of despotic rule from that the Mughals by attempting to restrict and reform what it believed to be the inherent and arbitrary excesses of oriental despotism.104 What distinguished military despotism from these earlier eighteenth-century iterations of despotism was its overt endorsement of conquest, coercion, and military might. Whereas the despotism of the eighteenth century had been profoundly preoccupied with reconciling the conquest of Bengal and India to older British notions of an ‘empire of liberty’ that extended British common law

 Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge, p. 65.  Sen, Distant Sovereignty, pp. xxix–xxx, 35; Alexander Dow, ‘A Dissertation on the Origin and Nature of Despotism in Hindostan’, in Dow, The History of Hindostan; James Mill, The History of British India, 3 vols. (London: Baldwin, Cradock, and Joy, 1817), vol. 1; Thomas R. Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 6–7, 28–39; Uday Singh Metha, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in NineteenthCentury British Liberal Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), esp. chaps. 2–3. 103  Robert Travers, Ideology and Empire in Eighteenth-Century India: The British in Bengal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 50. 104  As Travers puts it, ‘the British embraced what they hoped would be a new kind of despotism, a despotism of law underpinned by racial segregation and the rule of force, that would increasingly be justified by Europe’s supposed higher rank on the ladder of civilisation’: ibid., p. 30. 101 102

Colonial Knowledge and ‘Military Despotism’51

and representative government,105 military despotism embodied a more belligerent theory of imperialism that saw military force and coercion as not just legitimate, but absolutely necessary tools within the imperial project. Such a form of absolute military rule demanded the reproduction of military forms of authority, discipline, and hierarchy that privileged order and absolute obedience towards a single, all-powerful military governor. As such, military despotism necessarily placed much less emphasis on the rule of law, as early theorists of despotism had done, and more importance on the executive privilege and discretion of colonial officials. As Jack Harrington has recently demonstrated, Malcolm’s writings on empire in India represent one of the most comprehensive and coherent attempts to forge an ideology of empire during the first half of the nineteenth century.106 Malcolm’s thought, moreover, was not just highly influential among Company officials in India, but also had a profound impact on British public opinion back home. His 1811 Sketch of the Political History of India, for instance, proved so popular that it entered into its second edition of publication in the first year of its release.107 Although Malcolm’s work was deeply influenced by the trajectory of his extensive and fluid career – first as an officer in the Madras army, later as a prominent diplomat, and eventually as Governor of Bombay between 1827 and 1830 – he always saw himself as a military man at heart, and his writings continued to reflect the particular military-strategic c­ oncerns and agenda he developed serving in the Madras army.108 For Malcolm, the indispensable condition of Company rule was, and always would be, its military power.109 In The Political History of India (1826), an enlarged and revised version of his Sketch of the Political History of India, Malcolm argued that, ‘However much the success of our internal government may depend upon the civil administration of our eastern empire, our efforts to improve that might be given in vain, unless we maintain a commanding military power.’110 According to this understanding, every civil institution in India, from the collection of revenue to the judiciary, was necessarily supported by and depended

 Marshall, The Making and Unmaking of Empires.  Harrington, Sir John Malcolm, p. 150. 107  Förster, Die Mächtigen Diener, p. 302. 108  Harrington, Sir John Malcolm, pp. 149, 192. 109  Ibid., p. 149. 110  John Malcolm, The Political History of India, from 1784 to 1823, 2 vols. (London: John Murray, 1826), vol. 2, p. 201. 105 106

52

Colonial Insecurity in Early British India, 1757–1857

on the Company’s military power. ‘Our government .  .  . is essentially ­military’, wrote Malcolm, ‘and our means of preserving and improving our ­possessions through the operation of our civil institutions depend on our wise and politic exercise of that military power on which the whole fabric rests’.111 Malcolm even went so far to argue that the army, as India’s premier institution, could serve as the ‘nursery’ for the model Indian citizen.112 Invoking the common perception that Indian society was inherently militarised, Malcolm suggested that the army could be a means by which Indians were reformed, trained, and prepared for civil service under the Company.113 It is important to emphasise that while Malcolm was a staunch ­advocate of a distinctly militarised form of rule for India, he never endorsed the wholesale subordination of the civil apparatus of the Company’s government in India to the military. The prospect of a pure military dictatorship in India was anathema to him. Though civil power might always need to be closely supported by soldiers, Malcolm feared and deeply opposed measures that might ‘throw the means and temptations of a dangerous ascendancy into the scale of the military department’.114 Instead, Malcolm was a proponent of a fusion of India’s civil and military administration. In his view, the most effective system of administration for India would confer both military and civil powers onto Company administrators.115 As such, he urged that political appointments should  Ibid., pp. 244–5.  Harrington, Sir John Malcolm, p. 151. 113  Malcolm, The Political History of India, vol. 2, p. 243. This sentiment was echoed by Colonel John Studholme Hodgson. Noting how the army was critical part to the expansion and maintenance of India’s infrastructure, Hodgson argued that by completing public works, such as roads, sepoys would come to realise the many benefits bestowed by British rule. This, he argued, would transform them from ‘a mercenary into a patriotic army’: John Studholme Hodgson, Opinions on the Indian Army (London: W.H. Allen & Co., 1857), pp. 52–3. 114   Malcolm, for example, was staunchly opposed to attempts by parliamentary authorities in Britain to divest the Company of its military control over its Indian soldiers by placing them under the CINC in England, and agreed that: ‘to make so wide a separation of the military from the civil power, to take away the organization, the interior regulation, and with these the patronage of the army, from the local government, to place all these powers in the hands of the commander-in-chief, subject only, in the exercise of them, to an authority at the distance of half the globe, would throw the means and temptations of a dangerous ascendancy into the scale of the military department, which, constituted by his majesty, might easily be led to slight the civil servants of a meaner master, and their chance of distant redress’: Malcolm, The Political History of India, vol. 2, p. 208. 115  In February of 1805, Malcolm even recommended that his fellow soldier and friend, Sir Arthur Wellesley, should be appointed as both Governor-General (GG) and CINC, with the combined powers of both offices: John Malcolm, ‘Letter to Major Shaw’, February 4 1805, in John William Kaye, The Life and Correspondence of Major-General 111 112

Colonial Knowledge and ‘Military Despotism’53

not be determined by whether an individual came from a military or civilian background, and that a military career should in no way limit one’s career prospects within the higher branches of the civil service.116 Instead, Malcolm stressed how men of talent and ability should be nominated to positions of authority in India. At the same time, however, Malcolm also believed that it was most expedient for administrators to have a keen sense of military affairs. ‘The Government in India has been established, and must be supported, by the sword’, he wrote, ‘and this consideration gives the utmost importance to every question connected with our military establishment in that Country’.117 Malcolm’s writings remained major sources on the history of the founding of the empire in India until well into the twentieth century,118 and his endorsement of a distinctly militarised form of government became a model for an entire generation of Indian officials.119 Henry Lawrence, another prominent and highly influential soldier-­ administrator, and one of the architects of colonial rule in Punjab, was deeply influenced by Malcolm and likewise believed in the maxim that the indispensable condition of British rule was its military power. ‘At first sight, bayonets and red coats do not appear to be precisely the instruments of Government which a philanthropist would advocate’, wrote Lawrence, ‘but we belie or deceive ourselves when we declare or fancy that our Government is maintained otherwise than by the sword’.120 Many other officers adopted Malcolm’s notion that officials in India needed to be granted united military and civil powers, and bitterly complained

Sir John Malcolm, G.C.B, Late Envoy to Persia, and Governor of Bombay, 2 vols. (London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 1856), vol. 1, pp. 299–300. 116  Malcolm, Sketch of the Political History of India, p. 460. 117  Ibid., pp. 459, 479. 118  Harrington, Sir John Malcolm, p. 1. 119  See, for example, Anon, ‘The Military Constitution of our Indian Empire No. I’, Colburn’s United Service Magazine, 203 (1845): pp. 237–44; John Briggs, Letters Addressed to a Young Person in India (London: John Murray, 1828). Malcolm’s influence within the wider British metropolitan public cannot be understated either. According to Edward Ingram, Malcolm’s biographer, John William Kaye, effectively transformed Malcolm into ‘the model Anglo-Indian official’: Edward Ingram, In Defence of British India: Great Britain in the Middle East, 1775–1842 (London, 1984), p. 80. See also John William Kaye, Lives of Indian Officers, 2 vols. (1867; London: Strahan and Co. Publishers, 1869), vol. 1; John William Kaye, The Life and Correspondence of Major-General John Malcolm. 120  Henry Lawrence, ‘Military Defence of Our Indian Empire’, in Essays, Military and Political,Written in India (London: W.H. Allen & Co., 1859), p. 7. According to Hodgson, ‘This empire has been acquired by the sword, and it is not, and cannot be preserved by the mere efficacy of civil rule, be it ever so wisely or energetically administered’: Hodgson, Opinions on the Indian Army, p. 50. Other officers even insisted that the stability of British rule depended on the government’s ‘readiness to enter at any moment upon a campaign’: Captain Staples, ‘Our Military Establishment’, The Calcutta Review, 10:20 (1848): p. 371.

54

Colonial Insecurity in Early British India, 1757–1857

about the ‘mischievous operation of the practice of separating the political and military authorities in a disturbed country’.121 By over-emphasising the warlike aspects of India’s history and the supposedly disorderly character of its inhabitants, military officers like Malcolm were able to effectively press their professional claims towards a greater involvement in India’s political administration, in spite of a longer British political tradition of mistrust toward military intervention in civil society. As we have already seen, the prevalence of so many military men within the ranks of the Company’s civil administration helped push concerns about the security of British rule in India to the fore. Combined with the belief that India could only be held as it had been won – ‘by the sword’ – military power, force, and coercion came to be seen as absolutely essential corollaries of the imperial project. This idea of a crisis or insurrection that was always lurking and seething just below the surface, and which threatened to spill out at any moment, served as a constant reminder of the precariousness of the Company’s rule and was crucial in perpetuating the perception that its power ultimately rested on the strength of arms.122 This pervasive fear about the endlessly insurrectionary potential of their Indians subjects became an entrenched view and helped justify the continuance of deeply authoritarian, coercive, and militaristic aspects more generally. It is important to note, however, that while many of these military officers clearly understood how a perennial sense of colonial insecurity actually benefitted their careers, that many of these individuals also seem to have genuinely believed that India existed in a state of danger. As Henry Lawrence so aptly put it, India was a land that had ‘for nearly a thousand years been held by the sword’, and had ‘as often changed hands, as that sword has been blunted, or the grasp that held it relaxed’.123 ‘Our army has not only to protect from foreign aggression this immense territory’, he argued, ‘but also to coerce a population of not less than a hundred millions – many of them men of strong military, and others of stronger predatory habits . . . all feeling that they are under the yoke of a stranger’.124  Anon, ‘The Annexation of the Punjaub – The Blue Book’, Colburn’s United Service Magazine, 248 (1849): pp. 333, 339. 122  According to Peers, ‘the desired end of “civil society” in India was seen as so far away that over time the means came close to redefining the ends. Because fears for British India’s security were so entrenched, and were periodically reasserted in spectacular ways such as the rebellion of 1857–8, and the army’s advocates so widely distributed throughout the administration, means and ends could not be easily disentangled’: Douglas M. Peers, ‘Soldiers, Scholars and the Scottish Enlightenment’, The International History Review, 16:3 (August 1994): p. 457. 123  Lawrence, ‘Military Defence of our Empire in the East’, p. 35. 124  Ibid., p. 40. 121

The ‘Great Fear’ of 185755

1.5

The ‘Great Fear’ of 1857

Although military men insisted that the army was the key to the Company’s security in India, this colonial safeguard was always a double-edged sword that needed to be handled with care. Military officials, including both Malcolm and Thomas Munro were very much alive to the fact that if mistreated, this army – consisting overwhelmingly of indigenously recruited Indian soldiers known as sepoys – could just as soon turn against the Company as fight for it.125 Instances of mutiny dated almost as far back as the founding of the Company’s armed forces, but one of the most spectacular early examples occurred shortly before the British victory at the Battle of Buxar in 1764, when a garrison of sepoys stationed at Manjee near Patna mutinied over the issue of pay. Although the mutiny was quickly put down by Major Hector Munro, it provided a chilling prelude to the punishments exacted against the mutineers of 1857 when Munro ordered that 24 of the offending sepoys be executed by blowing them away from the mouths of artillery guns.126 Munro’s choice of such a spectacular form of punishment reflected his desire to strike terror into the hearts of the mutinous Indian soldiers, and also to reassert British prestige in the wake of the indignities that had been inflicted against their officers.127 As Harry Verelst, the future governor of Bengal, proudly reported back to his close friend, Richard Becher, Munro’s order ‘had the desired effect for it struck such a terror into the whole army . . . and a not a man has attempted to mutiny since’.128 Another even more alarming and traumatic incident of mutiny occurred at Vellore in 1806, when aggrieved and rebellious sepoys opened fire on the European barracks there, killing more than 100 men and a dozen officers. The British response was swift and merciless. Within hours, a relief force despatched from Arcot commanded by Colonel Rollo  Malcolm, Sketch of the Political History of India, vol. 1, p. 459; Alexander J. Arbuthnot (ed.), Major-General Sir Thomas Munro, Bart., K.C.B., Governor of Madras: Selections from His Minutes and Other Official Writings (London: C. Kegan Paul & Co., 1881), pp. 159, 182–3. 126  According to G.B. Malleson, ‘Munro was a humane man, averse from bloodshedding unless in cases of absolute necessity. But times were critical. Misplaced leniency would, he felt, endanger the whole fabric of British dominion in Bengal’: G.B. Malleson, The Decisive Battles of India from 1746 to 1849 Inclusive (London: W.H. Allen, 1883), pp. 194–5. 127  Munro’s decision was also most likely influenced by the fact that just a few months ­earlier, the Bengal Army had only narrowly contained a combined mutiny of both Indian and European soldiers. Throughout its history, the Company had to contend with several so-called ‘white’ mutinies of its European soldiers and officers, the most notable example being the 1809 mutiny in Madras: see Douglas M. Peers, ‘Between Mars and Mammon: The East India Company and Efforts to Reform its Army, ­1796–1832’, The Historical Journal, 33:2 (June, 1990): pp. 385–401. 128  Verelst to Becher, 25 January 1765, BL, IOR, Mss Eur F218/3, fp. 32. 125

56

Colonial Insecurity in Early British India, 1757–1857

Gillespie managed to regain control of the fort, killing or wounding nearly 700 of the rebellious sepoys in the process. Six of the surviving ringleaders were subsequently executed by cannonading, while another 13 were hanged or killed by firing squad.129 Despite their ultimate triumph over the mutineers, Vellore served as a stirring reminder of the constant dangers the British faced in India from their mendacious and conspiratorial subjects. John Blakiston, an officer in the Engineer Corps who was stationed at Vellore at the time of the mutiny, confessed that it had produced ‘an extraordinary sensation throughout our Indian possessions’. ‘No one’, he recounted, ‘knew how deeply rooted or extensive might have been the plot. The Europeans seemed to stand as it were on a volcano, one eruption of which had already been experienced, and which might be succeeded by others, they knew not how soon’.130 John William Kaye later wrote that in the wake of Vellore, ‘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’.131 For those who had lived in constant dread of some catastrophe that would overthrow Company rule in India, the Rebellion of 1857 ­provided an all-too terrifying confirmation of their deepest fears.132 On 10 May 1857, sepoys stationed in the cantonment town of Meerut in northern India mutinied against their British superiors. Just prior to the mutiny, rumours had circulated among the sepoys that the pre-greased ­cartridges used for the soon-to-be introduced Enfield rifle were coated with fat from cows and pigs. Because sepoys were required to bite the cartridges as part of the drill to load the new rifle, this would have been ritually polluting to their caste and religion, and offensive to both Hindus and Muslims.133 This apparent affront to their religious and cultural  James W. Hoover, Men Without Hats: Dialogue, Discipline and Discontent in the Madras Army, 1806–1807 (New Delhi: Manohar, 2007). 130  John Blakiston, Twelve Years’ Military Adventure in Three Quarters of the Globe, 2 vols. (London: Henry Colburn, 1829), vol. 1, pp. 312. 131  John William Kaye and G.B Malleson, Kaye’s and Malleson’s History of the Indian Mutiny of 1857–8, 6 vols. (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1914), vol. 1, p. 184. Kaye’s celebrated History of the Sepoy War in India was initially published between 1864 and 1876. It was later edited and expanded by G.B. Malleson and published in six volumes between 1888 and 1889 under the title History of the Indian Mutiny of 1857–8. In 1890, this was finally re-named Kaye’s and Malleson’s History of the Indian Mutiny of 1857–8. 132  Kaye, for instance, wondered whether the Vellore mutiny was actually the harbinger of the Rebellion of 1857: ibid., p. 178. 133  Other rumours contended that the British were actively mixing the bone-dust of pigs and cows into the flour used to produce the chapatis (bread) consumed by the sepoys in a deliberate attempt to subvert and destroy their status and religion. 129

The ‘Great Fear’ of 185757

s­ ensibilities, combined with other simmering grievances, prompted the sepoys to rise up and murder their British officers and any other white or Christian civilians they found, including women and children. Following the outbreak at Meerut, the mutineers proceeded to Delhi where they reinstalled Bahadur Shah II, the last Mughal emperor, to the throne. As the sepoys fanned out from Meerut towards Delhi, what had begun as a purely military mutiny eventually spiralled into a fully-fledged popular rising throughout large swathes of northern India as dispossessed elites and aggrieved peasants alike seized upon the opportunity to vent various long-held grievances against the Company.134 Four years earlier, Charles Napier had presciently warned that ‘Mutiny with the Sepoys is the most formidable danger menacing our Indian empire’.135 Indeed, the Rebellion was the largest anti-colonial movement of the nineteenth century, and took nearly two years to fully suppress. Despite the ultimate British triumph over the rebels, the ‘trauma’ of the ‘Mutiny’ had a profound and enduring impact on the collective British imagination. Contemporary British representations depicted it as an epic clash between the forces of barbarism and civilisation. Lurid stories of the atrocities committed by the rebels, most notably the Bibighar Massacre following the siege of Cawnpore and the alleged rape of white women, became particularly powerful and entrenched tropes within post‘Mutiny’ commemorative mythology.136 The Rebellion shook the empire in India to its core, and served once again as an acute reminder of the precariousness of British rule. According to George Otto Trevelyan, it had  There is a voluminous literature on the Rebellion of 1857, but some of the best accounts remain: Thomas R. Metcalf, The Aftermath of the Revolt: India, 1857–1870 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965); Eric Stokes, The Peasant and the Raj: Studies in Agrarian Society and Peasant Rebellion in Colonial India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978); Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983); Rudrangshu Mukherjee, Awadh in Revolt, 1857–1858: A Study in Popular Resistance (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1984); Eric Stokes, The Peasant Armed: The Indian Revolt of 1857, C.A. Bayly (ed.) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). For more recent examinations of the Rebellion, see William Dalyrymple, The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi 1857 (London: Bloomsbury, 2006); Anderson, The Indian Uprising of 1857–8; Mahmood Farooqui, Besieged:Voices from Delhi 1857 (Delhi: Penguin, 2010); Kim A. Wagner, The Great Fear of 1857: Rumours, Conspiracies and the Making of the Indian Uprising (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2010); Crispin Bates, Marina Carter et al. (eds.), Mutiny at the Margins: New Perspectives on the Indian Uprising of 1857, 6 vols. (New Delhi: Sage, 2013–14). 135  Napier, Defects, Civil and Military, p. 3. 136  See, generally, Jenny Sharpe, Allegories of Empire: The Figure of Women in the Colonial Text (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1993); Gautam Chakravarty, The Indian Mutiny and the British Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Christopher Herbert, War of No Pity: The Indian Mutiny and Victorian Trauma (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008); Wagner, The Great Fear of 1857; Tickell, Terrorism, Insurgency and Indian-English Literature. 134

58

Colonial Insecurity in Early British India, 1757–1857

‘irresistibly reminded us that we were an imperial race, holding our own on a conquered soil by dint of valour and foresight. Cantonments and arsenals, field batteries, and breaching batteries seemed more essential to the government of the country than courts of law, normal schools, and agricultural exhibitions’.137 As such, the Rebellion placed a much greater emphasis on the need for efficient, stable, and authoritarian rule.138 For the remainder of the colonial period, the British in India lived in constant fear that another similar uprising might occur.139 Writing in 1880, Richard Temple, a former Punjab administrator, claimed that British security in India could never be fully ensured so long as its population was still not ‘wholly docile’ and contained ‘turbulent’ and ‘warlike elements’: Small insurrections here and there from time to time are to be apprehended even during peace, and during political or military disturbance are sure to spring up in divers directions. Indeed, whenever anything occurs to shake the wonderful fabric of physical and moral power combined, which constitutes British dominion, and such things do occur sometimes, then disturbances arise in multitudes, none can say whence in what manner, like insects on a hot day, or like the fabled warriors from the ground sown with dragons’ teeth.140

Eight years later, John Strachey, the former Lieutenant-Governor of the North-Western Provinces and member of the Viceroy’s Council, echoed the same sentiment: It is hardly less true now than it was in 1857 that we are liable at all times to such dangers as this. Nothing is too foolish or too extravagant for general acceptance. This ought never to be forgotten. Ominous signs from time to time appear which ought to remind us how easily in India a terrible conflagration may be lighted up. There is no limit to the liability of such a population to be influenced by the assurances or suggestions of religious fanatics and political agitators, or to be disturbed by interference with its prejudices and beliefs.141

 G.O. Trevelyan, The Competition Wallah (London: Macmillan and Co., 1864), p. 302.  Mantena, Alibis of Empire, p. 54; Metcalf, The Aftermath of the Revolt; D.A. Low, Lion Rampant: Essays in the Study of British Imperialism (1973; Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991), pp. 39–82. 139  Wagner, ‘“Treading Upon Fires.”’ 140  ‘At such a moment’, Temple continued, ‘everything depends on the military potency of the Government to withstand or resist the gathering and thickening troubles. If the Government can then stand erect and masterful, it restrains the elements of mischief as a mighty dyke holds back the torrents rushing to form a united volume of flood. If it cannot so stand, then a cataclysm ensues, as when the surging waters overtop the dykes and sweep in an uncontrollable inundation over the land. Such an apprehension is not fanciful, but is derived from positive experience, which proves that such events have happened, and indicates how they might happen again’: Richard Temple, India in 1880 (London: John Murray, 1880), pp. 392–3. 141  John Strachey, India: Its Administration and Progress, 3rd ed. (1888; London: Macmillan and Co., 1903), p. 505. 137 138

The ‘Great Fear’ of 185759

In the wake of the Rebellion, the British developed increasingly strict racial hierarchies and social codes as a way of mitigating their anxiety about being surrounded by Indians, whom they viewed as inherently treacherous, disloyal, and prone to revolt.142 In order to uphold these divisions, Britons retreated into the ring-fenced enclaves of the hill stations, cantonments, and clubs, where their racial prestige could be more easily maintained.143 But even the purported safety and security offered by these sanctuaries of colonial power was always somewhat ephemeral. George Orwell’s Burmese Days (1934) illustrates this point quite well. At the beginning of the novel, the local European Club is described as ‘the spiritual citadel, the real seat of the British power, the Nirvana for which native officials and millionaires pine in vain’.144 It is a point of pride that the Club has never admitted ‘an Oriental’ as a member. But this is almost immediately undercut by the threatening proposition of granting membership to the ‘native’ Dr. Veraswami. By the end of the novel, the safety and sanctity of the club is further threatened in an even more obvious and direct way when a mob of local villagers rises in rebellion and lays siege to the Europeans trapped inside. Orwell’s novel takes an institution that is meant to be a source of British stability and security, and effectively turns it on its head by revealing the ultimate fragility and vulnerability of the subcontinent’s colonial overlords. At the same time that the British attempted to insulate themselves against the corrupting influences and dangers posed by Indian society, they also became increasingly preoccupied with uncovering and rooting out indigenous ‘conspiracies’. The apparent inability to predict the Rebellion was seen as a massive failure on the part on the part of the colonial state, and raised unsettling questions about the ability of Britons to truly ‘know’ India.145 In this sense, the British reaction to the Rebellion was evocative of the same sorts of anxiety-fulled ‘information panics’ that were triggered by their earlier encounters with other purported indigenous conspiracies, such as thuggee.146 But while fears about the existence of anti-colonial cabals and plots were hardly new, they undoubtedly  Steven Patterson, The Cult of Imperial Honor in British India (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p. 19. 143  Ibid., p. 42. See also David Gilmour, The Ruling Caste: Imperial Lives in the Victorian Raj (London: Pimlico, 2007); Collingham, Imperial Bodies; Dane Kennedy, The Magic Mountains: Hill Stations and the British Raj (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996); Judith T. Kenny, ‘Climate, Race, and Imperial Authority: The Symbolic Landscape of the British Hill Station in India’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 85:4 (December 1995): pp. 684–714. 144  George Orwell, Burmese Days (1934; London: Penguin, 2009), p. 14. 145  Bayly, Empire and Information, p. 315; Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj, pp. 139–42. 146  Bayly, Empire and Information, p. 316. 142

60

Colonial Insecurity in Early British India, 1757–1857

assumed a newfound place of importance within the ever-nervous colonial psyche. As Kaye so vividly put it in his celebrated History of the Sepoy War in India (1864–76): We know so little of what is stirring in the depths of Indian society; we dwell so much apart from the people; we see so little of them, except in full dress and on their best behaviour, that perilous intrigues and desperate plots might be woven, under the very shadow of our bungalows, without our perceiving any symptoms of danger. But still less can we discern that quiet under-current of hostility which is continually flowing on without any immediate or definite object, and which, if we could discern it, would battle all our efforts to trace it to its source. But it does not the less exist because we are ignorant of the form which it assumes, or the fount from which it springs.147

Kaye maintained that it was the distance between the British and their subjects that accounted for this anxiety. As he put it, ‘Differences of race, differences of language, differences of religion, differences of customs . . . severed the rulers and the ruled as with a veil of ignorance and obscurity. We could not see or hear with our own senses what was going on, and there was seldom any one to tell us’.148 Recognising that it was essential to obtain a better sense of Indian opinion, the British implemented new methods of formal and informal surveillance of their colonial subjects. Indian newspapers, particularly the burgeoning vernacular press, were placed under renewed scrutiny, while strict censorship regulations and harsh penalties were introduced to discourage editors from publishing potentially seditious material.149 In 1871, the colonial state also began to tighten its grip on traditionally mobile groups across North India through the introduction of the notorious Criminal Tribes Act, which permitted authorities to monitor and restrict the activities and movement of tribes and castes branded as ‘hereditary criminals’.150 Alongside these other developments, the Rebellion also gave a powerful boost toward ongoing efforts to reform India’s various provincial police forces. Though the evolution of colonial polices was a highly uneven process across India, most agencies  Kaye and Malleson, Kaye’s and Malleson’s History of the Indian Mutiny, vol. 1, pp. 257–8.  Ibid., p. 374. 149  Bayly, Empire and Information, pp. 340–1. 150  See, generally, Anand Yang (ed.), Crime and Criminality in British India (Tuscon, AZ: The University of Arizona Press, 1985); Sandria B. Freitag, ‘Crime in the Social Order of Colonial North India’, Modern Asian Studies, 25:2 (1991): pp. 227–61; Singha, A Despotism of Law; Andrew Major, ‘State and Criminal Tribes in Colonial Punjab: Surveillance, Control and Reclamation of the “Dangerous Classes”’, Modern Asian Studies, 33:3 (1999): pp. 657–88; Radhika Singha, ‘Punished by Surveillance: Policing “Dangerousness” in Colonial India, 1872–1918’, Modern Asian Studies, 49:2 (March 2015): pp. 241–69. 147 148

The ‘Great Fear’ of 185761

gradually began to employ networks of spies and informers in order to help them better anticipate and prevent crime, including riots, growing communal violence, and, of course, rebellions and conspiracies aimed at overthrowing the Raj.151 In 1887, the colonial state took its first steps toward establishing a centralised agency for political surveillance with the founding of the Central Special Branch. Formed from the heart of the old Thagi and Daikiti Department that had been established in 1830 by GovernorGeneral Bentinck to root out the menace posed by the so-called Thugs, the Central Special Branch was responsible for coordinating the intelligence provided by provincial agencies across India who regularly monitored the activities of potentially threatening Indian political parties and religious movements. Renamed the Department of Criminal Intelligence in 1903 (and, finally, the Intelligence Bureau in 1920), this agency grew in importance as the Indian nationalist movement increasingly began to challenge and destabilise colonial authority throughout the twentieth century.152 Following the Rebellion, then, repeated ‘information panics’ and systemic anxieties about the possibility of another revolt fuelled the proliferation and expansion of the colonial state’s surveillance apparatuses.153 The Rebellion served as an indelible reminder to the British of the dangers of being caught off guard, and justified the increasingly ­intrusive, authoritarian, and coercive attempts of the colonial state to penetrate ever deeper behind the ‘veil’ of Indian society.154 These pervasive anxieties about the inability to generate effective forms of colonial knowledge were often given expression in popular works of imperial literature by celebrated writers, including Arthur Conan Doyle; the sometime Governor-General of Canada John Buchan; and, of course, Rudyard Kipling. All of these authors wrote various stories featuring detectives and spies who assume the role of agents of imperial order by solving crimes and exposing subversive plots that threaten to overthrow  For a comparative look at these developments, see: Arnold, Police Power and Colonial Rule; Chandavarkar, Imperial Power and Popular Politics, chap. 6; Peter Robb, ‘The Ordering of Rural India: The Policing of Nineteenth-Century Bengal and Bihar’, in David M. Anderson and David Killingray (eds.), Policing the Empire: Government, Authority and Control, 1830–1940 (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1991), pp. 126–50; Bayly, Empire and Information, p. 339. 152  For a general overview, see Richard Popplewell, Intelligence and Imperial Defence: British Intelligence and the Defence of the Indian Empire, 1904–1924 (London: Frank Cass, 1995). 153  D.K. Lahiri Choudhury, ‘Sinews of Panic and the Nerves of Empire: The Imagined State’s Entanglement with Information Panic, India c. 1800–1912’, Modern Asian Studies, 38:4 (October 2004): pp. 965–1002. 154  Anand Yang, ‘A Conversation of Rumors: The Language of Popular “Mentalités” in Late Nineteenth-Century Colonial India’, Journal of Social History, 20:3 (Spring, 1987): pp. 485–505; Wagner, ‘“Treading Upon Fires”’. 151

62

Colonial Insecurity in Early British India, 1757–1857

imperial political, legal, and social stability.155 But while the investigative triumphs of their protagonists were meant to help soothe imperial nerves, these stories could not do so without invoking the same anxieties and fears they were meant to assuage. Kipling’s writings, in particular, present a rich source for exploring these themes. At times, Kipling’s stories represent an obvious attempt to temper colonial anxieties about the apparent inability of Britons to ‘know’ their colonial subjects by featuring ‘British’ characters who ­display a mastery over India by being able to blend in with and navigate the murky undercurrents of indigenous society.156 At other times, however, Kipling seems to cast serious doubts over this very possibility. For example, in the introduction to his collection of short stories entitled In Black and White (1899), Kipling’s semi-fictional assistant, Kadir Baksh, questions the ability of his master to understand anything about indigenous society that is not mediated directly through him. As Baksh puts it, ‘by what road can my sahib have acquired knowledge of the common people?’157 Later, in the opening of ‘On the City Wall’, the narrator comments that: Gentlemen come from England, spend a few weeks in India, walk round this great Sphinx of the Plains, and write books upon its ways and its works, denouncing or praising it as their own ignorance prompts. Consequently all the world knows how the supreme government conducts itself. But no one, not even the supreme government, knows everything about the administration of the empire.158

The rest of the story also serves as a cautionary tale about the reliability and trustworthiness of Indians. After a religious riot breaks out between Hindus and Muslims during the Shia festival of Muharram, the narrator is convinced by a local courtesan named Lalun to help escort an old Muslim landowner across the city to safety. As it turns out, the man the narrator assists is actually a notorious rebel leader named Khem Singh, who had fought against the British both in 1857 and during the ‘Kooka outbreak’ of 1872.159 Thus, while Kipling’s stories appear to point to the possibility that skilled British agents might be able to fashion effective forms of knowledge about Indian society, they also frequently pull the rug  Siddiqi, Anxieties of Empire, pp. 24, 30–1.  Kimball O’Hara, the eponymous hero of Kim (1901), and the policeman Strickland who first appears in Plain Tales from the Hills (1888), are two prime examples of this: Rudyard Kipling, Kim (London: Macmillan, 1901); Rudyard Kipling, Plain Tales from the Hills (1888; London: Macmillan and Co., 1920). 157  Rudyard Kipling, ‘Introduction’, in In Black and White (New York: The Lovell Company 1899), pp. 9–10. 158  Kipling, ‘On the City Wall’, ibid., p. 124. 159  For more on this event, see Chapter 3.

155 156

The ‘Great Fear’ of 185763

out from under this very notion. While colonial knowledge may have been an attempt to assert colonial power, Kipling’s work shows how it was an avowedly imperfect and sometimes ambiguous endeavour. Indeed, for all the preoccupation with imperial surveillance and preventive policing, the colonial constabulary in India remained remarkably ill-informed and were often unable to effectively anticipate, much less prevent, the outbreak of riots, disturbances, and insurrections.160 In the absence of more effective methods of intelligence-gathering and methods of deterrence, police forces frequently resorted to heavy-handed and brutal acts of coercion as a way of attempting to enforce law and order.161 These displays of colonial violence were intended to impart ‘moral’ lessons onto the ‘excitable’ and ‘irrational’ Indian population and reassert colonial authority before smaller disorders could grow into more serious challenges and threats. As ever, the spectre of 1857 loomed large in the minds of colonial police and soldiers alike, who were frequently called upon to quell these disturbances.162 By the twentieth century, however, the colonial state found it increasingly difficult to maintain public order in this fashion. As the Indian nationalist movement gained pace alongside growing communal tensions and burgeoning organised labour protests, British officials sought to bolster the coercive arsenal at their disposal by extending the range and depth of its judicial and executive powers through the promulgation of what Indian nationalists dubbed ‘repressive’ laws. These included such notorious legislation as the Prevention of Seditious Meetings Act (1911), the Anarchical and Revolutionary Crimes Act (1919), and the Rowlatt Act (1919).163 As J.C. Curry, a senior police official in Bombay, so starkly put in 1932, ‘No government, indigenous or foreign, autocratic or constitutional, can hope to administer such a country, unless its local officials have extensive legal

 In the case of colonial Madras, for instance, David Arnold has shown how the police repeatedly failed to predict rebellions and other acts of resistance despite the fact that their approach was often quite publicly signalled among local communities through the spread of rumours and by word of mouth: Arnold, Police Power and Colonial Rule, pp. 116–18. Wagner has explored the flip-side of this phenomenon: moments when the colonial state ‘knew too much’, and saw conspiracies and incipient rebellions where none actually existed: Wagner, ‘“Treading Upon Fires”’. 161  Chandavarkar, Imperial Power and Popular Politics, p. 216; Arnold, Police Power and Colonial Rule, p. 116. 162  Wagner has very recently drawn an explicit connection between the trauma of the Rebellion, the suppression of the ‘Kooka outbreak’ of 1872, and the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre of 1919: Wagner, ‘“Calculated to Strike Terror.”’ 163  Report of the Committee Appointed to Examine Repressive Laws, National Archives of India, New Delhi (NAI), Foreign/General B/February 1922, no. 82. The history of these sorts of ‘repressive’ laws will be explored at length in Chapters 4 and 5. 160

64

Colonial Insecurity in Early British India, 1757–1857

powers and ultimately the backing of unlimited force’.164 Far from being acts of strength and power, then, these sorts of reactionary, authoritarian, and violent crackdowns were actually symptomatic of the actual and perceived vulnerabilities, weaknesses, and limits of the colonial state.165 Try as they might, the British were never able to shake the nightmarish memory of 1857.166 The celebrated writer, historian, and translator Edward Thompson described the enduring influence of the Rebellion in his novel The Other Side of the Medal (1925): Because of the Mutiny a great fear broods over the European community in India, and from time to time, often on very slight provocation, leads to an ­outcry from ‘energetic people’ for immediate martial law. The Mutiny – that nightmare of innumerable savage hands suddenly upraised to kill helpless women and ­children – has been responsible for the waves of hysteria which from time to time have swept the European community and for a while made it a pathological case for pity and sympathy.167

Yet, as undoubtedly important as the Rebellion was in determining the shape of this post-1857 colonial culture of fear in India, it is important to stress how this was simply a more specific and recent rendering of a much more deep-seated phenomenon that stretched back to the uncertain founding of the Company state in the late eighteenth century. As we have seen, the British colonial establishment in India, from the outset, was characterised by a profound preoccupation with its own (in)security, and while the particular form that dangers to the colonial order might have shifted over time, the one thing that remained constant was the idea that India was a dangerous, unstable place that required the constant vigilance of its colonial overlords in order to prevent it from descending into anarchy and chaos. 1.6 Conclusion Writing on 10 May 1848, Governor-General Dalhousie remarked how the news of the deaths of Vans Agnew and Anderson at Multan had come as a great shock to him. ‘Two days before the letter reached me’, he wrote,

 J.C. Curry, The Indian Police (London: Faber & Faber Limited, 1932).  Sherman, State Violence and Punishment; Chandavarkar, Imperial Power and Popular Politics, chap. 6. 166  According to Thomas Metcalf, the Rebellion created a legacy of fear and vulnerability that could ‘never wholly be quelled’ and which continued well into the ‘heyday’ of empire: Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj, pp. 160, 168; also, Wagner, ‘“Treading Upon Fires”’. 167  Edward Thompson, The Other Side of the Medal (London: Leonard & Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press, 1925), pp. 86–7. 164 165

Conclusion65

‘I should have forwarded the report . . . “that perfect tranquillity prevailed in the Punjab”, without any more doubt on my own mind of the probable endurance of that tranquillity than is raised by the consciousness that, in India, one is always sitting on a volcano’.168 Further on, Dalhousie made it very clear how aware he was of the danger that this act of rebellion represented to British prestige, and that to allow it to go unpunished for too long would result in ‘still greater peril to the interests of British India’.169 Upon a careful reading of Dalhousie’s letter, it is possible to discern two distinct tones. On the one hand, his pronouncement about the ‘perfect tranquillity’ that had purportedly hitherto prevailed in Punjab was meant as a testament to the strength of British power – and one which seemed confirmed by the subsequent victory in the Second Anglo-Sikh War. Yet, despite this apparent self-confidence, Dalhousie’s statement that the British in India were always sitting on the edge of a volcano hinted that this same power might also be somewhat chimerical. Dalhousie’s insistence on the importance of preserving British prestige indicates an awareness that colonial authority depended at least as much (if not more) on the appearance of invulnerability as it did on its material strength. The audacious murder of Agnew and Anderson had shattered this image of colonial omnipotence, exposing the fragility and weakness of India’s ‘ruling race’ and making it absolutely imperative to strike back as quickly as possible against the recalcitrant Sikh state. Shortly after conclusion of the Second-Anglo Sikh War, James Abbott described it this way: The sacredness attaching generally throughout our own provinces to the life of British officers is one of the secrets by which our empire is maintained and should be upheld by every means in the power of the Government. But if unlimited opportunity is afforded an armed population to retaliate by bloodshed affronts offered to their persons or their prejudices, and if we be found powerless to avenge such murders, it is quite impossible that this sacredness should be maintained.170

The British responses to the rebellion at Multan and the ensuing Second Anglo-Sikh War were both emblematic of the colonial culture of insecurity that had profoundly shaped the character of British rule in India since its outset. Whether these fears were of military threats from foreign Indian states, as in the 1780s to the 1840s, or the internal disorder and rebelliousness of their supposedly conquered colonial subjects, as with 1857, British colonial rule in India was characterised by a pervasive and

 Baird, Private Letters of the Marquess of Dalhousie, p. 24.  Ibid., p. 26. 170  Raynor, Journals and Diaries, p. 288. 168 169

66

Colonial Insecurity in Early British India, 1757–1857

deep-seated sense of malaise and trepidation.171 Again, it was Dalhousie himself who perhaps best expressed this, in a Minute he penned in February of 1856 as he was preparing to depart from India. Looking back on his eight years as Governor-General, Dalhousie was keen to emphasise the achievements and successes of his administration, notably the victory over the Sikhs, the conquest of Lower Burma, the suppression of the Santhal Rebellion, and the annexation of Awadh. Nevertheless, he also felt it necessary to sound a strong note of caution against those who might presume that the British position was secure: No prudent man, who has any knowledge of Eastern affairs would ever venture to predict the maintenance and continued peace within our Eastern possessions. Experience, frequent hard and recent experience, has taught us, that war from without, or rebellion from within, may at any time be raised against us, in quarters where they were the least to be expected, and by the most feeble and unlikely instruments. No man, therefore, can ever prudently hold forth assurance of continued peace in India.172

As we shall see throughout the rest of this book, variations of Dalhousie’s warning would be repeated time and again by colonial officials right up until the very end of British rule in India. Indeed, it was this permanent sense of weakness and vulnerability that was used to justify the establishment and maintenance of vast amounts of coercive manpower and their attendant patterns of military patronage, the enactment of highly repressive forms of internal policing and judicial discipline, and the frequent colonial recourse to physical violence. All of this was done in the name of preserving the safety and security of an unrepresentative, despotic, and ultimately anxious colonial regime.

 As M.E. Yapp puts it, ‘British India lived in fear of an insurrection which could ­neither be predicted, nor understood, nor controlled.  .  . Again and again Britons in India describe themselves as men walking in a powder-magazine’: Yapp, Strategies of British India, pp. 11–12. 172  Minute by Dalhousie, 28 February 1856, PP, 1856 (245) XLV.107, Minute by Marquis of Dalhousie, February 1856, Reviewing His Administration in India, 1848–56, p. 5. 171

2

Re-Assessing the ‘Garrison State’: Pacification and Colonial Disquiet in Punjab

The Sikhs themselves are warlike in their character, turbulent and brave. But warlike and turbulent as they are, the Sikhs are not more so than the people of Rohilcund once were . . . but if their s­ ubjection shall now be rendered complete, if effectual measures be taken now to deprive them of the means of resistance, or facilities for war – if vigilance be exercised over them, and if they shall hereafter be ­governed with justice, vigour, and determination, I know no reason why the Sikhs should not be rendered hereafter as submissive and harmless as the people of Rohilcund now are. Minute by Governor-General Dalhousie, 18491

2.1 Introduction Following the Rebellion of 1857, the British military labour market in north-central India collapsed and gradually gave way to an alternative recruiting arena in the north-west.2 Since the 1820s, the Bengal Army had favoured recruiting high-caste Brahmins into its ranks, guaranteeing lucrative opportunities for both economic and social advancement.3 The mutiny of these high caste Brahmin soldiers, however, severely undermined the viability of this system, and led to a radical reassessment of the ideological and practical principles of British military recruiting policy under both the Peel Commission (1858) and the Eden Commission (1879). By 1880, these revamped recruiting practices, combined with a renewed British strategic interest in the Great Game with Russia along the North-West Frontier, helped transform Punjab into the principal recruiting ground for the Indian Army.4 This shift to Punjab conferred

 Dalhousie’s Minute to the Secret Committee, 7 April, 1849, PP, 1849 (1075) XLI.683, Continuation of Papers Relating to the Punjab, no. 52, p. 664.  For more about the North Indian military labour market, see Kolff, Naukar, Rajput and Sepoy. 3  Alavi, The Sepoys and the Company, pp. 5–9. 4  Tan, The Garrison State, p. 12. 1

2

67

68

Re-Assessing the ‘Garrison State’

upon the province an unparalleled strategic and political importance and made it one of the most important outposts within the whole of the British Empire. By 1900, nearly 35 per cent of the Indian Army was composed of soldiers recruited from Punjab, which itself contained less than 10 per cent of the total population of British India.5 The highly selective nature of this process was further amplified by the fact that recruits were drawn only from a very narrow cross-section of Punjab’s population known as the ‘martial races’, who were thought to possess inherently superior soldiering abilities.6 The highly exclusive nature of these recruiting practices placed enormous political importance on maintaining the stability and satisfaction of these select groups from Punjab. The Rebellion had demonstrated in spectacular fashion just how dependent British power was on the support of its sepoys, and colonial officials realised that if a similar catastrophe were to be prevented, the loyalty and contentment of these soldiers needed to be preserved at all costs, especially now that they were being drawn from an increasingly narrow segment of Indian society. This mutually reinforcing relationship between military dependence and political patronage ensured that these groups were well-compensated by the colonial state by way of generous tax assessments, preferential land grants, and the protection of their status as landholders. These became the defining features of Punjab’s political economy, transforming the province into a veritable ‘garrison state’, where the interests of the military were always given first priority.7 The structures and institutions of this garrison state would not only profoundly shape the contours of Punjab’s politics for the remainder of the colonial period, most notably ensuring it  Rajit K. Mazumder, The Indian Army and the Making of Punjab (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003), pp. 18–19. 6  Omissi, The Sepoy and the Raj; L. Caplan, ‘Martial Gurkhas: The Persistence of Discourse on Race’, in Peter Robb (ed.),The Concept of Race in South Asia (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997): pp. 260–81; Heather Streets, Martial Races: The Military, Race, and Masculinity in British Imperial Culture, 1857–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004). More recent work by Gavin Rand and Kim Wagner has challenged the overall coherence of the theory of the martial races, arguing that these were much more complex and malleable categories: Gavin Rand and Kim A. Wagner, ‘Recruiting the “Martial Races”: Identities and Military Service in Colonial India’, Patterns of Prejudice, 46:3–4 (2012): pp. 232–54. Tahir Mahmood’s micro study of the important Shahpur district during the First World War has also shed new light on how recruiting practices were also crucially shaped by intra-elite competition of local ruling families: Tahir Mahmood, ‘Collaboration and British Military Recruitment: Fresh Perspectives from Colonial Punjab, 1914–1918’, Modern Asian Studies, 50:5 (September 2016): pp. 1474–1500. 7  Tan, The Garrison State; Mazumder, The Indian Army; Ian Talbot, The Punjab and the Raj 1849–1947 (New Delhi: Manohar, 1988); Ian Talbot, ‘British Rule in the Punjab, 1849–1947: Characteristics and Consequences’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 19:2 (1991): pp. 203–21. 5

Introduction69

remained a bastion of British support during the nationalist movement, but would also come to dominate the development of the Pakistani state in the postcolonial era.8 But despite the widely acknowledged historical importance of Punjab’s garrison state, the tendency of existing scholarship to emphasise the successes of this system has obscured how it was also a source of intense apprehension for colonial authorities. This chapter argues that Punjab’s ‘mighty’ garrison state was fundamentally predicated upon and driven forward by an often tense and uneasy relationship between the colonial state and those same groups who were meant to be its closest allies. It explores how many of the priorities and ideologies that underpinned colonial state-building in Punjab can be traced back to the ways in which anxious British administrators initially attempted to come to grips with ruling over a population they believed to be inherently ‘unruly’, ‘warlike’, and ‘turbulent’. Concerns about the martial prowess and rebelliousness of Punjab’s inhabitants, specifically the province’s Sikh population, preoccupied the early colonial state in the aftermath of the Second Anglo-Sikh War. After disbanding the defeated Khalsa army of the former Sikh kingdom, the British were presented with the complex problem of how to transform thousands of former Sikh soldiers into governable subjects.9 Confronted with what they perceived as a militant, and potentially criminal element of Punjabi society, British colonial officers sought to pacify and placate these former Sikh soldiers by converting them into quiescent farmers. Because the bulk of Ranjit Singh’s powerful Khalsa army had come from the central Majha region of Punjab, the social and political appeasement of these Sikhs became a key priority for the newly-established Punjab Government. In their quest to pacify these Sikhs, the Punjab Government developed a series of irrigation and revenue schemes aimed at expanding the agricultural productivity of the Majha, hoping that this would ease the transition of these former soldiers to agriculturalists. The apparent success of this fusion of political, economic, and military measures was proven in the eyes of British administrators when the Sikhs of the Majha remained loyal to the British during the Rebellion of 1857 and helped them to

 See Ayesha Jalal, The State of Martial Rule: The Origins of Pakistan’s Political Economy of Defence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Talbot, ‘British Rule in the Punjab, 1849–1947’; Imran Ali, ‘The Punjab and the Retardation of Nationalism’, in D.A. Low (ed.), The Political Inheritance of Pakistan (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1991): pp. 29–52. For a more recent examination of this subject, see Ishtiaq Ahmed, The Pakistan Garrison State: Origins, Evolutions, Consequences, 1947–2011 (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2013). 9  N.M. Khilnani, British Power in the Punjab 1839–1858 (Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1975), p. 178. 8

70

Re-Assessing the ‘Garrison State’

reconquer territory lost to the rebels.10 This military-agrarian system was later expanded upon and extended to other important military-agrarian groups throughout Punjab, culminating in the large land grants and economic concessions awarded to the military during the construction of the great canal colonies from the 1880s onwards.11 The early Punjab administration’s preoccupation with pacifying and containing what it believed to be a potentially threatening segment of society infused it with a unique sensitivity towards security concerns that was reflected in its policy. From the outset, Punjab officials realised that discontent among rural groups that had traditionally provided soldiers for the state had the potential to unleash disaster, and took steps to alleviate causes for unrest. In so doing, however, these same officials also set the colonial state down a path of nervous conciliation where it would look to maintain its security by ensuring the contentment and prosperity of these military-agrarian classes. The great irony of all this was that as the state became increasingly dependent on these groups to prop up its rule, the more wary it became of anything that might upset this delicate balance. Thus, despite remaining quite loyal overall throughout most of the colonial period, British administrators were haunted by fears that these ‘warlike’ and ‘turbulent’ subjects still might someday rebel against them. As a result, the colonial government went to great lengths to appease and maintain the support of these crucial soldier-cultivators. Nowhere was this more evident than with the Punjab Government’s reaction to widespread rural discontent during the Punjab disturbances of 1906–7. As we shall see throughout this chapter, the same system that contributed to the militarisation and securitisation of Punjab was actually a chronic source of insecurity for the British colonial state – a fact that was ­certainly not lost on the British themselves. 2.2

Militant Sikhism and the Re-writing of Sikh History

Sikhs were perhaps the most famous and iconic of India’s so-called ‘­martial races’. Despite representing a mere 2 per cent of the total population of British India, Sikhs made up more than 12 per cent of the Indian Army by the early 1920s, making them one of the most recognised minorities throughout the subcontinent.12 From the 1880s onwards,  For a study of the Sikh role during the Rebellion of 1857–8, see Dolores Domin, India in 1857–59: A Study of the Role of the Sikhs in the People’s Uprising (Berlin: AkademieVerlag, 1977). 11  One of the key texts on this subject remains Imran Ali, Punjab under Imperialism, ­1885–1947 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988). 12  Mazumder, The Indian Army, pp. 18–19. 10

Militant Sikhism and the Re-writing of Sikh History71

the image of the martial Sikh was codified in a series of ethnographic handbooks produced by the army that provided detailed information to recruiting officers about the physiological and cultural distinctiveness that made Sikhs such superior soldiers.13 Regimental histories, paintings, and popular literature also helped popularise and romanticise Sikh soldierly prowess.14 Even academic studies extolled their warrior virtues. In the opening of his seminal six-volume history of Sikhism, The Sikh Religion: Its Gurus, Sacred Writings, and Authors (1909), Max Macauliffe unabashedly proclaimed that ‘Sikhs are distinguished throughout the world as a great military people’.15 This image of Sikhism retains its potency even today, and is reproduced within the Sikh community, as well as ­popular culture and literature more generally.16 Yet as undoubtedly powerful and influential as representations of Sikhs were, recent scholarship has attempted to destabilise these monolithic categories of martial races t­heory to show how these were much more flexible, contested, and contingent than is often acknowledged.17 Ideal types often did not exist, and recruiting practices were complicated by a tension between adhering to these normative standards and the practical exigencies of meeting necessary army quotas. Many of the images and stereotypes that underpinned these later representations of Sikhism actually built upon much older British perceptions that stretched back to the late eighteenth century.18 However, unlike latter nineteenth century representations that largely celebrated  See, for example, R.W. Falcon, Handbook on Sikhs: For the Use of Regimental Officers (Allahabad: The Pioneer Press, 1896); A.E. Barstow, Recruiting Handbook for the Indian Army: Sikhs (Calcutta: GOI Press, 1898). 14  Streets, Martial Races. For examples of this, see George Fletcher MacMunn, The Armies of India (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1911); George Fletcher MacMunn, The Martial Races of India (London: Sampson Low, Marston and Co., 1933). 15  Max Arthur Macauliffe, The Sikh Religion: Its Gurus, Sacred Writings and Authors, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1909), vol. 1, p. v. There is still a highly charged and contentious debate today surrounding representations of Sikh history and identity. For a summary of the contours of this, see J.S. Grewal, Contesting Interpretations of the Sikh Tradition (New Delhi: Manohar, 1998). 16  The centenary commemorations of India’s participation in the First World organised by the United Services Institution of India and the Indian Ministry of External Affairs offers a prime example of how these images are being propagated: see ‘India and the Great War’, USI-MEA. Accessed 24 November 2015: http://indiaww1.in. 17  Gajendra Singh, ‘“Finding Those Men with Guts”: The Ascription and Re-Ascription of Martial Identities in India after the Uprising’, in Crispin Bates and Gavin Rand (eds.), Mutiny at the Margins: New Perspectives on the Indian Uprising of 1857, Vol. 4: Military Aspects of the Indian Uprising (London and New Delhi: Sage, 2013): pp. 113–34; Rand and Wagner, ‘Recruiting the “Martial Races”’. 18  Most historical examinations of the martial races theory tend to conceptualise these ideas within late Victorian mentalities of pseudo-scientific racial ideologies and ideals of masculinity. See, for example, Streets, Martial Races, pp. 1–17. 13

72

Re-Assessing the ‘Garrison State’

the martial prowess of the Sikhs, these earlier British attitudes towards Sikhs were characterised by apprehension and concern. Colonial officials believed that the evolution of Sikh history, culture, and society had imbued them with especially ‘warlike’ tendencies that made them dangerous adversaries and unruly subjects. In order to better understand the early Punjab administration’s anxious preoccupation with pacifying this potentially threatening segment of society, it is thus necessary to examine the longer history of British perspectives of Sikhism. Throughout most of the eighteenth century, the British were generally unconcerned with the history of Punjab or its inhabitants. However, as the Company’s territorial conquests during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries gradually brought Punjab closer to its own geo-political ambit, British officials displayed an increasing interest in gathering strategic intelligence on their powerful new neighbours.19 By this time, Punjab was seen as a predominantly Sikh polity. Between 1799 and 1801, Ranjit Singh had united the loose confederacy of Sikh misls that had successfully resisted the Mughals and later defeated the incursions from the Durrani Empire,20 forging them into what became the politically and militarily powerful Sikh kingdom. Complete with its own highly trained, European-style military, the Sikh kingdom was seen as one of India’s most formidable Mughal successor states.21 The meteoric rise of Ranjit Singh and the Sikhs to political pre-eminence in Punjab after centuries of oppression and religious persecution at the hands of the Mughals transfixed early British observers, many of whom looked to history to provide an explanation for the success of the Sikhs. The earliest major British account of Punjab and the Sikhs was Major James Browne’s An History of the Origin and Progress of the Sicks (1788).  Grewal, Contesting Interpretations, p. 26.  During their struggle against the religious persecution by the Mughals, the Sikhs organised themselves into independent military and political units called misls. Though factional in nature, these misls could also come together and unite when faced with an exterior threat, such as the invasions by Ahmad Shah Durrani and Nadir Shah during the eighteenth century. Misls began usually as little more than war parties, but as they started to acquire territory, they also began to take over many of the administrative functions that had previously been held by the Mughal state. By the late eighteenth century, they were even replicating certain Mughal patterns of political authority and kingship. For more on the history of the Sikh misls see: Harjot Oberoi, The Construction of Religious Boundaries: Culture, Identity and Diversity in the Sikh Tradition (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994); W.H. McLeod, Sikhs of the Khalsa: A History of the Khalsa Rahit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Joyce Pettigrew, Robber Noblemen: A Study of the Political System of the Sikh Jats (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975). 21  For information about the powerful Sikh military system, see Khushwant Singh, A History of the Sikhs, 2 vols. (1966; Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1991), vol. 1; Fauja Singh Bajwa, Military System of the Sikhs during the Period 1799–1849 (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1964). 19 20

Militant Sikhism and the Re-writing of Sikh History73

Figure 2.1  Maharajah Ranjit Singh © The British Library Board, Add.27254, f.176v.

Compiled at the behest of the Company’s Court of Directors, Browne’s account was based largely on a translation of a Persian manuscript he had acquired while serving as the Resident to the court of Shah Alam II. In his work, Browne set out to explain the origins and history of the Sikh religion, and in so doing, he established two important frameworks by which Sikhs would subsequently be understood by the British. The first

74

Re-Assessing the ‘Garrison State’

was that Sikhism was a reforming, modernising religion.22 It was the ‘internal vigour’ of this reforming religion, as Browne put it, that had allowed Sikhism to survive the ‘bloody persecution’ of the Mughals, and it was also the source from which the Sikhs drew their strength.23 This played into the second major theme propagated by Browne: namely, that the Sikhs were a more masculine, vigorous, and forceful group than the supposedly ‘effete’ or ‘decadent’ inhabitants of India whom the British had hitherto encountered. According to Browne, the Sikhs possessed ‘a manly boldness in their manners and conversation, very unlike the other inhabitants of Hindoostan, owing no doubt to the freedom of their government’.24 This notion that Sikhs were a more ‘manly’ and ‘vigorous’ group than other Indians was adopted by subsequent British writers, and increasingly lent itself to the perception that Sikhs actually represented a powerful and distinct ‘race’. The concept of race in its more well-known late nineteenth-century biological guises is often absent from studies of eighteenth and early nineteenth-century British imperialism. But from the 1770s onwards, the emerging ‘science’ of race was, in fact, intimately related to orientalism and provided an important analytical field for assessing civilisational concepts, especially relating to religion.25 In the case of the Sikhs, religion and race were mutually reinforcing concepts, reaffirming that the Sikhs possessed not only a distinct set of religious observances and practices from Hindus and Muslims, but also an inherent set of biological differences. In 1798 the traveller and explorer George Forster, for example, argued that unlike the ‘effete’ Hindus or the decadent and ‘sensual’ Muslims, the success of the Sikhs and their military conquests was due to their ‘endurance of excessive fatigue, and a keen resentment of injuries’.26 In his widely influential 1812 treatise on Sikh history and culture, John Malcolm similarly observed how the Sikhs were a more ‘robust’ race than other Indians due to the fact that they lived  According to Browne, Sikhism appeared to ‘bear that kind of relation to the Hindoo religion, which the Protestant does to the Romish’: James Browne, India Tracts: Containing a Description of the Jungle Terry Districts, their Revenues,Trade and Government: with a Plan for the Improvement of Them. Also An History of the Origin and Progress of the Sicks (London: Logographic Press, 1788), p. iv [hereafter referred to as Origin and Progress of the Sicks]. 23  Ibid., p. xi. 24  Browne, Origin and Progress of the Sicks, p. x. 25  Shruti Kapila, ‘Race Matters: Orientalism and Religion, India and Beyond c. ­1770–1880’, Modern Asian Studies, 41:3 (2007): pp. 471–513. 26  ‘The personal endowments of the Sicques’, he continued, ‘are derived from a temperance of diet, and a forbearance from many of those sensual pleasures which have enervated the Indian Mahometans’: George A. Forster, A Journey from Bengal to England, through the Northern Part of India, Afghanistan, and Persia and into Russia, by the Caspian Sea (London: R. Faulder, 1798), p. 289. 22

Militant Sikhism and the Re-writing of Sikh History75

‘fuller’ lives and were exposed to a ‘better and colder climate’.27 Writing in 1834, the famous soldier-explorer Alexander Burnes (popularly known as ‘Bokhara Burnes’) was astonished that such a relatively ‘new tribe’ could be so physically distinct from its neighbours, and provided detailed descriptions of the unique features that differentiated Sikhs from other inhabitants of India.28 Edward Thornton’s 1844 Gazetteer compiled at the behest of the Court of Directors similarly noted that Sikhs were more ‘robust’ and more ‘full, muscular, and symmetrical’ than their Hindu counterparts.29 By the early 1840s, then, the idea that Sikhs represented a separate, more powerful race had become a well-­established trope within colonial discourse. The biological distinctiveness between the powerful, manly Sikh race and the purportedly feeble Hindus and decadent Muslims was also reinforced by the religious particularity of Sikhism and its reputation for being a ‘militant’ religion. Early histories of Sikhism like Forster’s emphasised how Sikhism had emerged from a series of brutal struggles against Mughal religious persecution, and that their religion had been transformed into an essentially militant faith through the teachings of Guru Gobind Singh (1666–1708).30 The sometime soldier and pioneering antiquarian of Afghanistan Charles Masson observed in 1842 that once the Sikhs had armed themselves against the persecution by the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb, ‘the sword was drawn, which has never since been sheathed’. ‘The Síkhs are not enjoined to observe many forms or prayers’, Masson continued, but when they did, it was always ‘in conformity to the military complexion thrown over all their acts’.31 Another account claimed that Sikhs were trained from birth to bear arms and that ‘every Sikh is by the tenets of his religion a soldier, not even excepting

 John Malcolm, Sketch of the Sikhs; a Singular Nation, Who Inhabit the Provinces of the Penjab, Situated between the Rivers Jumna and Indus (London: John Murray, 1812), p. 129. 28  ‘With an extreme regularity of physiognomy, and an elongation of the countenance’, Burnes wrote, ‘they may be readily distinguished from the other tribes’, and ‘in such a short period of time, [that] some hundred thousand people should exhibit as strong a national likeness as is to be seen among the children of Israel, is, to say the least of it, remarkable’: Alexander Burnes, Travels into Bokhara; being the Account of a Journey from India to Cabool, Tartary, and Persia; also, Narrative of a Voyage on the Indus, from the Sea to Lahore, 3 vols. (London: John Murray, 1834), vol. 1, p. 46. 29  Edward Thornton, A Gazetteer of the Countries Adjacent to India on the Northwest; Including Sinde, Afghanistan, Beloochistan, the Punjab, and the Neighbouring States, 2 vols. (London: W.H. Allen & Co., 1844), vol. 2, p. 136. Thornton’s work was based heavily on the earlier writings of John Malcolm, Alexander Burnes, Charles Masson, and W.G. Osborne. 30  Forster, A Journey from Bengal. 31  Charles Masson, Narrative of Various Journeys in Balochistan, Afghanistan, and the Panjab, 3 vols. (London: Richard Bentley, 1842), vol. 1, pp. 424, 432. 27

76

Re-Assessing the ‘Garrison State’

the priesthood’.32 Even Joseph Cunningham’s highly influential History of the Sikhs (1849), which was criticised in its own time for presenting an overly sympathetic depiction of Sikh history, presented the Sikhs as an essentially ‘martial’ people.33 With their long history of armed struggle, their adherence to a militant religion, and the belief that they constituted a biologically distinct and superior ‘race’ compared to other Indians, the Sikhs were viewed by the British as formidable and dangerous adversaries. Of course, these British portrayals of Sikhism as an inherently ‘militant’ religion were obviously essentialising and reductionist in nature, tending to flatten the rich and heterogeneous practices that existed within the Sikh tradition.34 Nevertheless, they played a critical role in shaping British colonial policies. The image of the Sikhs as a ‘race’ of warriors that found such renown in the second half of the nineteenth century was instrumental in driving the exclusive recruiting practices that led to the Punjabisation of the post-1857 Indian Army. Yet just a few decades earlier, these same representations of Sikh martial might were sources of great anxiety and concern for the British. Colonial officials feared the wayward and bellicose Sikhs, and came to view them as one of the most threatening and dangerous groups in India. For those who had any doubts, the two Anglo-Sikh wars cemented the idea that the Sikhs were especially dangerous foes, and convinced the British that the only way to ensure their own security was to completely subdue this ‘warlike’ nation. In a proclamation issued just before the end of the Second Anglo-Sikh War, Dalhousie declared that he was ‘compelled to resolve upon the entire subjection of a people, whom their own Government has long been unable to control, and whom (as events have now shewn) no punishment can deter from violence, no acts of friendship can conciliate to peace’.35 This same sense of unease about the Sikhs would become integral in shaping  A Cavalry Officer, Military Service and Adventures in the Far East: Including Sketches of the Campaigns against the Afghans in 1839, and the Sikhs in 1845–56, 2 vols. (London: Charles Ollier, 1847), vol. 2, p. 251. 33  Joseph Davey Cunningham, A History of the Sikhs, from the Origin of the Nation to the Battles of the Sutlej (London: John Murray, 1849). For an example of some of the contemporary criticisms levelled against Cunningham’s overly ‘sympathetic’ version of Sikh history, see Anon, ‘A History of the Sikhs, from the origins of the Nation to the Battles of the Sutlej; by Joseph Davey Cunningham, Lieutenant of Engineers and Captain in the Army of India’, The Calcutta Review, 11:21–2 (January–June 1849): pp. 523–58. 34  For an examination on the heterogeneous practices within the Sikh tradition, see Oberoi, The Construction of Religious Boundaries; Grewal, Contesting Interpretations; W.H. McLeod, Exploring Sikhism: Aspects of Sikh Identity, Culture, and Thought (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000). 35  Proclamation by the Governor-General, 29 March 1849, PP, 1849 (1075) XLI.683, Continuation of Papers Relating to the Punjab, no. 51, pp. 654–5. 32

The Politics of Pacification77

the early policies of the colonial state in Punjab, and would help set it down the path towards developing into a garrison state. 2.3

The Politics of Pacification

From its inception, the Punjab Government sought to pacify what it perceived to be a wayward and turbulent people. To date, however, few historians have examined how fundamental this preoccupation was in shaping the policies and strategies of governance adopted by the colonial state – how the language of pacification permeated the formative debates within the early administration and laid the groundwork for the emergence of Punjab’s garrison state.36 This section examines how ­pervasive fears about the militancy of Punjab’s inhabitants, specifically the Jat Sikhs of central Punjab, drove one of the most important and penetrating early interventions by the colonial state into Punjabi society: the mass irrigation of central Punjab through the construction and extension of canal lines. In so doing, the colonial government laid the key foundation for a nexus of military and agrarian interests that would eventually come to dominate the political and strategic agendas of the province for the remainder of British rule. Shortly after the conclusion of the Second Anglo-Sikh War, Dalhousie outlined his plans for the governance of Punjab. In a Minute from April 1849, he stressed the need for the British to make their presence felt by their new subjects, and to assert ‘absolute conquest’ over the former Sikh state. In his view, Punjab could never become a stable, secure province within the empire until it had been thoroughly pacified and subjugated: if we do not thus reduce to absolute subjection the people who have twice already rudely shaken our power in India, and deprive them at once of power and of existence as a nation: – if concession or compromise shall be made: – if, in short, the resolution which we adopt, shall be anything less than full assertion of absolute conquest of our enemy, and maintenance of our conquest hereafter, – we shall be considered, throughout all India, as having been worsted in the struggle. We must make the reality of our conquest felt. The moderation, which was wise and politic before, would, if repeated . . . be the veriest feebleness now.37

For Dalhousie, the tranquillity of Punjab could never be assured until the last vestiges of the former Sikh state apparatus, particularly its military,  Although Domin has touched on some of these issues in her examination of Sikh involvement in the Rebellion of 1857, her work does not really attempt to link these developments to broader processes within the late nineteenth and early twentieth-­century colonial state in Punjab: Domin, Role of the Sikhs. 37  Dalhousie’s Minute to the Secret Committee, 7 April, 1849, PP, 1849 (1075) XLI.683, Continuation of Papers Relating to the Punjab, no. 52, p. 664. 36

78

Re-Assessing the ‘Garrison State’

had been completely dismantled and subsumed to British rule. ‘There will never be peace in the Punjab’, he continued, ‘so long as its people are allowed to retain the means, and the opportunity, of making war. There never can be now any guarantee for the tranquillity of India, until we shall have effected the entire subjection of the Sikh people, and destroyed its power as an independent nation’.38 Despite his reputation for being an archetypal civilian administrator, Dalhousie’s language lays bare how his vision of Punjab governance was, from the outset, informed by the same bellicose rhetoric of militarism and conquest espoused by many military officers in India.39 The lessons of the Second Anglo-Sikh War had made it all too apparent that the old Khalsa army represented an unacceptable threat to British rule in the province. As such, one of the first priorities of the newly established Punjab Government was the general disarmament of the whole of Punjab (with the exception of the trans-Indus and frontier districts)40 as well as the disbandment of the Khalsa army. Proclamations were placarded throughout Punjab, threatening heavy fines, potential prison terms, and even the seizure of jagirs (land grants) or any other holdings or land rights possessed by those who refused to surrender their arms; numerous forts and other fortifications were also demolished.41 The disarmament programme was considered an unqualified success, and the Punjab Government was able to proudly report that, ‘In the whole of the Punjab Proper, the arms seized and surrendered of all kinds numbered 119,796. It is beyond doubt that the execution of this measure has tended to the pacification of the Province’.42 Officials were especially  Ibid., p. 662.  Dalhousie was always very careful to keep the military in check during his tenure in India. Charles Napier, for example, famously resigned as CINC of the Army in India after a bitter conflict with Dalhousie over the right of the CINC to alter army wages in order to avert a mutiny. See Dalhousie’s Minute, 14 June 1850, and Sir Charles Napier’s Memorandum, 22 May 1850, PP, 1854 (80) XLVII.197, Papers Relating to the Resignation by General Sir Charles Napier of the Office of Commander-in-Chief in India, pp. 11, 19. 40  British officials believed that the frontier was too unsettled and warlike for this measure to succeed. British subjects living in the settled areas were thus permitted retain their weapons in order to defend against the depredations of the unsettled frontier tribes. As one official put it, ‘to disarm the frontier district bordered by a lawless and turbulent population would be a measure dangerous to the public safety, calculated to give rise to great discontent and indignation, and almost certain to fail’: NAI, Foreign/Political A/ August 1875/nos. 11–12; NAI, Foreign/Frontier A/June 1903/nos. 47–9. Chapter 4 will return to this issue at greater length. 41  Letter from the PG to the GG 30 April 1849, India Secret Consultations 28 April–30 June 1849, BL, IOR, P/SEC/IND/159, no. 65. 42  General Report Upon the Administration of the Punjab Proper, for the Years 1849–50 & ­1850–51, Being the First Two Years After Annexation: with a Supplementary Notice of the Cis 38 39

The Politics of Pacification79

pleased to note that the greatest seizure of arms occurred in the ‘most martial districts of the Punjab’.43 The Punjab Government also thought it noteworthy that ‘the robbers and murderers, subsequently captured, have never been found with effective weapons. Their arms were either rudely manufactured, or worn out and rusty with age’.44 In addition to this broad programme of disarmament, a general muster of the Khalsa army and all other military retainers was called at Lahore, where thousands of soldiers were paid and then disbanded.45 Only 10 regiments were retained, mostly as military and regular police.46 According to the Punjab Government: That large bodies of brave men, once so turbulent and formidable as to overawe their Government and wield the destinies of their country, should lay down their arms, receive their arrears and retire from an exciting profession to till the ground, without in any place creating a disturbance, is indicative of the effect which had been produced by the British power.47

Despite such unbridled enthusiasm over the success of this ‘physical’ pacification of Punjab, British administrators were nonetheless sensitive to the sorts of military and civil problems that might accrue when thousands of former soldiers were suddenly disbanded and forced away from their traditional forms of military employment. Following the reductions to the Sikh army in the wake of the First Anglo-Sikh War, for e­ xample, British officials noted a rise in crime in the central Majha region of Punjab. As John Lawrence wrote in early March of 1848, ‘There have been lately some murders, and a number of highway robberies, perpetrated, no doubt, by parties of the soldiery, who have been disbanded during the past year; the large number of men who have thus been thrown out of employment could not fail to involve much individual suffering, and induce parties to resort to plunder, for a livelihood.’48 Predictably, the

and Trans-Sutlej Territories (Lahore: Chronicle Press, 1854), para. 183, p. 56. This report was the first of a series of similar reports that were printed by the Punjab Government beginning in 1854. These reports were published every two years by the Punjab Government, but from 1859 onwards they were published annually. Hereafter, these reports will referred to as ‘PAR’, followed by the date, e.g. ‘PAR 1858–9’. 43  Letter from the PG to the GG, 4 April 1850, no. 170, NAI, Foreign/Secret/31 May 1850, nos. 42–34. 44  PAR 1849–50 & 1850–51, para. 183, p. 56. 45  Ibid., para. 101, pp. 32–3. 46  Singh, A History of the Sikhs, vol. 2, p. 90; Andrew J. Major, ‘The Punjabi Chieftains and the Transition from Sikh to British Rule’, in Low (ed.), The Political Inheritance of Pakistan, pp. 71–2. 47  PAR 1849–50 & 1850–51, para. 101, pp. 32–3. 48  Lawrence to the GOI, 1 March 1848, PP, 1849 (1071) XLI.1, Papers Relating to the Punjab, 1847–1849, no. 23, p. 112.

80

Re-Assessing the ‘Garrison State’

wholesale disbandment of the Khalsa army in 1849 produced a ­similar situation in which thuggee and dacoity (gang robbery) became especially prevalent in the central districts of Punjab, including the Majha, as many former soldiers from that region turned to crime.49 For the British, the Majha was the key political and strategic lynchpin of their newly annexed province. Not only was it considered the ‘­cradle’ of Sikhism, from which the former Sikh state’s leading classes had originated,50 but it was also the region from which the majority of the old Khalsa soldiery had been recruited. Although the Khalsa army had been heterogeneous in its composition, including groups as diverse as Rajputs, Brahmins, Khatris, Gurkhas, Punjabi Muslims, Pashtuns, and even Europeans, a significant portion of it had been composed of Sikhs.51 When one considers how Sikhs formed only approximately one-sixth of the entire population of Punjab, their numerical preponderance within the Khalsa army becomes all the more striking. These Sikhs, moreover, consisted overwhelmingly of Jat agriculturalists from the central regions of Punjab, namely the Majha and the Doaba, skewing the geographical spread of disbanded soldiers even further.52 It was thus no exaggeration for John Lawrence to declare in 1848 that the Majha was ‘the seat of the Sikh power, and is the tract from which the flower of their soldiery were recruited’.53 As Dalhousie summed it up in a Minute from 1850: if insurrection is to be expected in the Punjab, it will certainly occur within the Manjha, the district which is peculiar to the Sikh population, which has always been warlike and turbulent, and which since the occupation of the Punjab has given shelter to the disbanded soldiery of the army dispersed in 1849, as well as of that which was reduced in 1846.54  It is interesting to note, however, that most of those engaged in thuggee were Mazhbi or Sainsi Sikhs, and not Jats: Singh, History of the Sikhs, vol. 2, pp. 94–5. 50  See Oberoi, The Construction of Religious Boundaries, p. 43; Grewal, The Sikhs of the Punjab, p. 95. 51  In 1845, Sikhs constituted 52 out of 62 battalions of regular infantry, or about 45,000 out of 54,000 men. Sikhs also made up 9.766 out of 10,796 irregular cavalry during the rule of Ranjit Singh: Bajwa, Military System of the Sikhs, pp. 140–1. 52   W.H. McLeod estimates that Jats constituted approximately 66 per cent of the entire Sikh population, and were drawn to Sikhism in order to advance their caste status: W.H. McLeod, ‘Sikhs and Caste’, in Tony Ballantyne (ed.), Textures of the Sikh Past: New Historical Perspectives (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 113–14. 53  Lawrence to the GOI, 31 March 1848, PP, 1849 (1071) XLI.1, Papers Relating to the Punjab, 1847–1849, no. 25, p. 115. According to Henry Prinsep, ‘The men in the Manja or Bari doab, between the Ravi and the Beas, are reputed to be the bravest and most warlike of the Punjabis’: Henry Thoby Prinsep, History of the Punjab, and of the Rise, Progress and Present Condition of the Sect and Nation of the Sikhs, 2 vols. (London: W.H. Allen & Co., 1846), vol. 1, p. 42. 54  Minute by the GG, 25 December 1850, NAI, Foreign/Secret/27 December 1850/nos. 30–35, no. 30. See also Letter no. 1260 from the PG to the CINC, 20 December 1849, NAI, Foreign/Secret/31 May 1850/nos. 21–4. 49

The Politics of Pacification81

Because of their numerical preponderance within the former Khalsa army, as well as their large concentration throughout central Punjab, Jat Sikhs were singled out as one of the most important classes whose ­interests needed to be preserved and maintained if the British were to effectively consolidate their colonial power in Punjab. Under Ranjit Singh’s rule, Jat Sikhs had risen to special prominence as one of Punjab’s premier political groups, receiving considerable economic and political entitlements.55 According to Sleeman, ‘The Seikh is a military nation formed out of the Jâts .  .  . by that strong bond of union, the love of conquest and plunder.’56 Their overwhelming representation within the Khalsa army also meant that Jat families were furnished with valuable military salaries that were used to expand their already considerable hold over agriculture in central Punjab.57 According to the first Punjab Administration Report, Jat Sikhs were ‘yeomen by lineage and habit’, and being equally proficient in both agriculture and war, had formed ‘the core and nucleus of the Sikh commonwealth and armies’.58 With the disbandment of the Khalsa army, however, thousands of these hitherto privileged Jat Sikh soldiers were forced to re-join their families in the countryside,

 Henry Lawrence described the ‘privileged’ position of Jat Sikhs in an essay from 1847: ‘They have lost little that they held under Runjít Singh; they are therefore patient and submissive, if not contented and happy; but had they been reduced to the level of our revenue-paying population, there cannot be a doubt that ere now there would have been a strike for freedom. The Sikhs perhaps care as little for their Government as do other natives of India; but, like others, they care for themselves, their jaghirs, their patrimonial wells, gardens and fields – their immunities and their honour. And in all these respects, the Sikh and Jat population had much to lose. The Sikh position must not be mistaken. They are a privileged race; a large proportion have jaghirs and rent-free lands; all hold their fields on more terms than the Mussulmans around them’: Henry Lawrence, ‘Lord Hardinge’s Indian Administration’, in Lawrence, Essays, Military and Political, p. 307. 56  Sleeman, Rambles and Recollections, vol. 2, p. 233. 57  Domin, Role of the Sikhs, p. 48. Even before this, Jats were already the single largest ­landowning agricultural group in Punjab, owning anywhere between 30 and 60 per cent of the land, depending on the particular region, and so these developments only strengthened their already considerable influence and landed interests: Indu Banga, Agrarian System of the Sikhs: Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Century (New Delhi: Manohar, 1978), p. 8. 58  PAR 1849–50 & 1850–51, para. 10, p. 4. Such depictions of Jat Sikhs were deeply informed by the early British observers mentioned above, who had drawn very specific linkages between agriculture and warfare. According to Burnes, ‘The genuine Sing, or Khalsa, knows no occupation but war and agriculture; and he more affects the one than the other’: Burnes, Travels into Bokhara, vol. 1, p. 45. Malcolm also drew a sharp connection between Sikh cultivators and soldiers: Malcolm, Sketch of the Sikhs, pp. 131–2. Masson even went so far as to remark how Sikhs were ‘almost exclusively a military and agricultural people’: Masson, Narrative of Various Journeys, vol. 1, pp. 425, 434. By the late nineteenth century, this connection between Jat Sikh cultivators and military service had become so well entrenched that Lepel Griffin, a former Punjab official, depicted Sikhs almost exclusively as being comprised of Jats and ‘Singhs’: Lepel Griffin, Ranjit Singh (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1892). 55

82

Re-Assessing the ‘Garrison State’

and to take up agriculture as the only legitimate form of employment available to them.59 According to some estimates, as much as 12.5 per cent of the total Sikh population in some areas was now comprised of former Jat Sikh soldiers.60 With so many soldiers returning to the fields, agricultural production rose, prices dropped, and families were no longer able to enjoy remittances from their sons’ military salaries, which had been an important means for supplementing family incomes. Depressed prices also meant that many agriculturalists found it difficult to pay the ‘unpleasant novelty’ of the newly instituted system of cash payments introduced by the British, and so rural disaffection became widespread.61 Punjab administrators quickly recognised that if they hoped to successfully subdue what they perceived to be a particularly turbulent, and now disaffected, section of the population, they needed to provide real alternatives to banditry and thievery. Realising that one of the most daunting impediments to the effective reintegration of these soldiers into the rural population was the fact that land was at an all-time premium now that far more people were returning to it than could be effectively supported, colonial officials struck upon the idea of implementing a massive irrigation program in order to expand the amount of arable land in central Punjab. Despite the existence of some irrigation works, large tracts of the Majha plains had remained uncultivated under Sikh rule due to an inadequate investment in canal construction and maintenance.62 John Lawrence had already foreseen the difficulties this dearth of irrigation would cause following the reductions to the Khalsa army after the First Anglo-Sikh War. ‘The great mass of these men’, he wrote, ‘came from the unirrigated valleys of the Manjha. These spots are now thronged by soldiers, disbanded since the war, but chiefly deterred from taking to agriculture for a livelihood, from the deficiency of irrigation’.63 In his opinion, the only viable solution was to cut new canal lines to increase the area of arable land in the region. His letter made clear that, ‘In a

 Domin, Role of the Sikhs, p. 99.  R.H. Davies and M. Blyth, Report on the Revised Settlement of the Umritsur, Sowrian, and Turun Tarun Purgunnuahs of the Umritsur (Lahore: Hope Press, 1860), BL, IOR, V/27/314/459, para. 129, p. 65. 61  PAR 1854–55 & 1855–56, para. 45, pp. 27–8; Punjab District Gazetteers, vol. 30A: Lahore District, 1916 (Lahore: Superintendent Government Printing, Punjab, 1916), BL, IOR, V/27/67/144, p. 186; Domin, Role of the Sikhs, p. 102. Prior to British rule, revenue collection was somewhat more flexible and was obtained in both cash and kind: Banga, Agrarian System of the Sikhs, chap. 5. 62  Banga, Agrarian System of the Sikhs, p. 7. 63  Lawrence to the GOI, 31 March 1848, PP, 1849 (1071) XLI.1, Papers Relating to the Punjab, 1847–1849, no. 25, p. 115. 59 60

The Politics of Pacification83

political . . . as well as a financial, view, the opening up of new lines of canals would prove of vast importance’.64 In late May of 1849, the Punjab Government made it explicit that if Punjab were to be profitable and quiescent, the prosperity of the Majha Sikhs had to be maintained by expanding irrigation: If the Punjab is to be made to pay its expenses, if we can hope to keep up efficient Military and Civil establishments, while taxing the people less than they have been accustomed to pay (and unless we can do so, we afearedly cannot expect to win their good will), if we wish to feed the thousands of human beings whom the change of rule must necessarily throw out of employment, we cannot more readily do so, then by cutting new Canals and improving the beds of old ones.65

Canals and ready access to irrigation, it was believed, would transform the soldier-peasantry and would induce them to settle down and till the land quietly – to ‘turn their swords into ploughshares’.66 As the Punjab Government saw it, ‘A Canal alone can give employment to the Soldiers and followers of the Sikh Army, and transform a multitude of turbulent, hungry people into peaceable and industrious cultivators.’67 Thus, the principal objectives of early British irrigation efforts in Punjab were intimately and inextricably tied up with larger military priorities of pacification.68 The Punjab Government’s information about the state of irrigation across the province was based largely on a report compiled by Major Robert Napier, the superintending engineer to the former Residency government in Lahore, and a man who had extensive knowledge and experience of Punjab. Napier had previously served as consulting engineer to Henry Lawrence, and had supervised the construction of various public works, including roads, bridges, cantonments, frontier defences, and irrigation projects. Following the Second Anglo-Sikh War, Napier was appointed to the post of civil engineer to the new Punjab Government at which time he began a comprehensive scheme of public works, including  Ibid.  PG to the GOI, 30 May 1849, BL, IOR, H/760, no. 24, pp. 220–1. 66  This phrase was used sarcastically by Charles Napier during his debates with Dalhousie and the Punjab Government over whether Punjab should be placed under the direct control of the military. It was Napier’s contention that it would be very difficult to convert former Sikh soldiers into farmers, and that the peace and stability of Punjab would never be assured unless it were placed under direct military rule: Memorandum by the CINC, 27 November 1849, BL, IOR, P/SEC/IND/165, no. 114, 26 April 1850. 67  PG to the GOI, 30 May 1849, BL, IOR, H/760, no. 24, p. 222. 68  This was equally true of British effort to settle Punjab’s NWF. For a recent examination of the relationship between British pacification efforts and irrigation, see David Gilmartin, Blood and Water: The Indus River Basin in Modern History (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2015). 64 65

84

Re-Assessing the ‘Garrison State’

the clearage and restoration of the Husli canal in the Bari Doab region; he also conducted surveys to plan for the construction of new canals and lines of irrigation. As the quintessential ‘man on the spot’, Napier was one of the first to realise the concomitant relationship between the accessibility and availability of arable land and levels of military recruitment from the Majha. He noted, for example, that well-irrigated villages near canals contained far fewer discharged Khalsa soldiers and that the vast majority of soldiers came from poorer villages within the dry tract between Lahore and Kasur, which contained only small patches of cultivation, drawn mostly from fairly shallow dug wells.69 In Napier’s assessment, these discharged soldiers were among some of Punjab’s most dissatisfied people, and the most effective way of converting these jobless soldiers into productive and content agriculturalists was to extend lines of irrigation within these poorer parts of the Majha. ‘I cannot imagine any thing more likely to contribute to the permanent tranquillity of the Country’, he wrote, ‘than the increased occupation for them as Cultivators, which will be afforded by the construction of Canals’.70 Canal construction projects also doubled as a means of absorbing the surplus labour of many of these former soldiers, who were employed extensively in both the initial survey ­projects, as well as the actual construction.71 Dalhousie approved the Punjab Government’s proposals for canal construction in December of 1849, and work began on the Bari Doab canal project in 1851.72 The central line of the Bari Doab canal was to stretch for 247 miles, beginning where the Ravi river debouched from the Himalayas in the north, down through the heart of the Majha and into the wastes of the lower doab before rejoining the Ravi 56 miles above Multan. Three separate subsidiary branches – the Kasur, Sobraon, and Lahore – would extend for 84, 61, and 74 miles respectively, amounting to a grand total of 466 miles of canal works throughout the entire doab.73 Official estimates predicted the canal would irrigate at least 654,000 acres of wasteland, at a cost of 53 lakhs (100,000 rupees), or £530,000. The Bari Doab canal project, therefore, was one of the largest, most ambitious, and costly public works projects of the early Punjab colonial administration. Numerous setbacks, including ballooning financial costs,74 meant that  Report on the Shah Nehr, or Husli Canal by Maj. R. Napier, ibid., p. 229.  Ibid., p. 230. 71  PG to Dalhousie, 21 June 1851, NAI, Foreign/Political/18 July 1851/nos. 102–4. 72  Minute by Dalhousie, 19 December 1849, BL, IOR, H/760, pp. 239–42. 73  PAR 1849–50 & 1850–51, para. 357, p. 137. 74  By 1860, total expenditure on the project had nearly doubled from these original estimates to nearly 1 million, or Rs. 9,629,189: PAR 1859–1860, para. 84, p. 32. 69 70

The Politics of Pacification85

work on the upper branch of the canal was not completed until 1861, though parts of the main branch were opened as early as April of 1859.75 At Dalhousie’s insistence, other irrigation projects, including those in the Rechna doab, were ignored in favour of completing the Bari Doab canal more quickly.76 This led to a pronounced neglect with regard to maintaining and expanding irrigation in other parts of the province, making the inhabitants of the central areas of Punjab the chief beneficiaries of the economic and social interventions of early British colonial rule.77 Not only did this mean that others areas of Punjab remained underdeveloped in terms of irrigation, but they also did not enjoy the same boom in roads, bridges, and other communication lines that were required to accommodate the new canal. By 1861, it was estimated that the canal was already irrigating 90,505 acres of land, most of it located in the Majha, which was already the richest and most agriculturally productive region of the province.78 But even before the main branch of the canal had been opened, the Punjab Government was already toasting the success of their new project. Writing in 1854, officials boasted that: The early absorption of the famous Seikh soldiery into the body of society will be a theme for future historians. The fiercer spirits have taken employment under their conquerors, and are serving on the Indus in the far West. . . But the majority have returned to agriculture in their Native Manjha and Malwa, and anticipate the opening of the new canal. The staunch foot soldier has become the steady cultivator, and the brave officer is now the sturdy village elder.79

Expanding irrigation was initially less about developing backward areas of the province, and was more about using an ostensibly civil development project in order to pacify what was believed to be a strategically vital region and cross-section of Punjab’s society. This does not mean that other considerations, such as famine reduction and financial growth, were entirely absent. They did, however, take a backseat to the crucial priority of wooing Punjab’s important military classes. This provides a contrast to the colonial experience of canal-building in the nearby

 Ibid., para. 52, p. 20.  Minute by Dalhousie, 19 December 1849, BL, IOR, H/760, pp. 239–42. During the crisis period of 1857–8, for example, when almost all other public works projects were suspended, the Bari Doab canal was one of the only projects to be carried on due its ‘political urgency’: PAR 1856–57 & 1857–58, para. 54, p. 31. More modest schemes of canal expansion and maintenance were implemented in the Multan, Leia, and Derajat divisions, but were never given the same degree of urgency or political importance. 77  Domin, Role of the Sikhs, p. 68. 78  PAR 1860–1861, para. 110, p. 35. 79  PAR 1851–52 & 1852–53, para. 497, p. 213. 75 76

86

Re-Assessing the ‘Garrison State’

province of Sindh, where the colonial state was initially quite slow to develop irrigation or use it for such overtly political purposes.80 Punjab officials, however, were uniquely sensitive to the fact that the bulk of India’s soldiery was traditionally drawn from the rural population, and took measures to secure the contentment and loyalty of the Jat Sikhs of central Punjab. In so doing, this initial intervention placed increased emphasis on the political importance of this particular region and its inhabitants, helping lay the groundwork for a nexus of military-agrarian interests that would come to dominate governmental policies for the rest of the colonial period and beyond. 2.4

Economic Patronage and Military Recruitment

Although the expansion of agriculture and irrigation was crucial in early British efforts to placate the Jat Sikhs of central Punjab, these measures alone were not sufficient to relieve the enormous pressure placed on rural parts of the Majha following the disbandment of the Khalsa army. With so many new farmers suddenly taking up the plough, crop prices naturally dropped due to the increase in agricultural output, and a severe pricing crisis ensued in the early 1850s.81 Realising that this would lead to widespread hardship and disaffection among the rural cultivating classes, British administrators intervened on behalf of the peasantry. Over the next few years, revenue demand was re-adjusted to both enable these farmers to pay the newly implemented cash assessments and to curb the emergence of rural discontent. This same strategy of using lenient revenue assessments in conjunction with expanding irrigation to ensure the contentment of Punjab’s politically important rural cultivating classes would later become one of the cornerstones of the crucial military-agrarian alliance that defined Punjab’s garrison state in the wake of 1857. Since the grant of the Bengal diwani (the right to collect land revenue) to the EIC in 1765, the essential driving force behind British imperialism in India had been the protection, extraction, and maximisation of its land revenue. Land revenue allowed the Company to build an army capable of challenging its regional rivals, and the maintenance and expansion of this same army through land revenue enabled the British to consolidate and expand their territorial holdings throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Described by historians as a type of ‘military-fiscalism’,  Daniel Haines, Building the Empire, Building the Nation: Development, Legitimacy, and Hydro-Politics in Sind, 1919–1969 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 81  In some instances, prices dropped by nearly 50 per cent: Domin, Role of the Sikhs, pp. 60, 102–4. 80

Economic Patronage and Military Recruitment87

this nexus between revenue extraction and military power was a defining feature of colonial expansion and rule in India.82 In Punjab, however, an interesting reversal of the well-established pattern of military-fiscalism occurred. Instead of aggressively attempting to maximise profits, Punjab administrators realised that generous tax assessments could be used as a way of gaining political capital and safeguarding against rural discontent and rebellion. ‘When it is remembered’, wrote John Lawrence, ‘that this tax furnishes three-quarters of the state resources, that it is paid by ­agriculturalists comprising three-quarters of the population, that their contentment and happiness is more vitally affected by the manner in which this tax is levied and administered than by any circumstances whatsoever, the extreme importance of the subject is manifest’.83 In Rajit K. Mazumder’s view, it was the Punjabisation of the Indian Army in the wake of the Rebellion of 1857–8 that drove this system of extremely generous revenue assessments.84 Although Mazumder is undoubtedly correct that the subsequent recruiting shift to Punjab ascribed heightened political importance to policies of conciliation, the Rebellion simply reaffirmed the effectiveness of the principles of lenient revenue assessment that had guided Punjab administrators since the early 1850s. Following the outbreak of the Rebellion of 1857, as colonial administrators scrambled to assign blame for the crisis, G.B. Malleson observed that what had begun as a purely military mutiny had quickly turned into a ‘national insurrection’ because the British had alienated themselves from the militarily vital north Indian cultivators upon whom their power intimately depended: The Rajpoot villages in Behar, those in the districts of Benares, Azimgurh, Cawnpore, Meerut and Agra, in the provinces of Rohilcund and Oudh, shook off our rule and declared against us. But the men who administered the affairs of India refused to admit the existence of events which were clear to all around them; they persisted in governing as though there were no disorder in the civil districts, and feigned to believe that the cultivators of the soil – the class from which the Sepoys are selected – were, to a man, in our favour.85

Fortunately for the British, not all of the north Indian peasantry rose against them. Unlike the North-Western Provinces and Awadh, where rural disaffection led to a widespread series of outbreaks and revolts alongside the  See, for example, Bayly, ‘The British Military-Fiscal State’; Peers, Between Mars and Mammon, chap. 5. 83  Qtd. in Septimus Smet Thorburn, The Punjab in Peace and War (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1904), pp. 182–3. 84  Mazumder, The Indian Army, chap. 3. 85  G.B. Malleson, The Mutiny of the Bengal Army: an Historical Narrative by One who has Served under Sir Charles Napier (London: Bosworth and Harrison, 1857), p. 53. 82

88

Re-Assessing the ‘Garrison State’

mutiny of the Bengal Army, Punjab remained relatively quiescent because colonial administrators here had proactively begun to address many of the grievances which fuelled revolt in these other areas.86 As the Punjab Government smugly remarked in 1858, ‘the reward was reaped when the day of trial came .  .  . the agricultural classes were comfortable and quiet; none were pinched in circumstances; none were looking forward to change’.87 Once again, the prime importance ascribed to the Majha region of central Punjab ensured that the Jat Sikh landowning and cultivating classes were the primary targets and beneficiaries of this policy. In their initial revenue assessments conducted just following Punjab’s annexation in 1849, British settlement officers had attempted to ‘reduce the land-tax and to lighten the burdens of the people’ to shore up s­ upport for the new British regime.88 To this end, they lowered the previous revenue demand under the Sikh kingdom significantly, by around 50 lakhs, or £500,000 sterling.89 But despite these efforts it was soon realised that these settlements were generally inaccurate, unevenly distributed, and still overly burdensome on the cultivators. Initial settlement operations in the Amritsar district carried out by Major Lake between 1849 and 1850, for example, were based largely on ‘scanty records’ from the Sikh period, and led to ‘crushingly severe’ assessments in the Ajnala and Amritsar tahsils (administrative sub-divisions).90 Settlement operations between 1850 and 1858, therefore, took special pains to correct these previous errors, and additional reductions amounting to nearly 54 lakhs, or £539,647, were applied.91 Revenue rates were lowered in almost every tahsil and flexible reductions were applied whenever fear of undue hardship existed. Even in those areas where the potential to increase revenue without unduly burdening the cultivators existed, settlement officers demonstrated remarkable moderation. During their reassessment of the Amritsar district between and 1850 and 1854, R.H. Davies and M. Blyth determined that they easily could have increased the revenue demand, but ‘it was found expedient, partly from political causes to retain the present jumma [demand]’.92 This policy of moderation became even more important in  For the causes of agrarian revolt during 1857–8, see Stokes, The Peasant and the Raj; Stokes, The Peasant Armed; Mukherjee, Awadh in Revolt. 87  PAR 1856–57 & 1857–58, para. 37, p. 20. 88  PAR 1851–52 & 1852–53, para. 257, p. 93 89  Thorburn, The Punjab in Peace and War, p. 183. 90  J.A. Grant, Final Report on the Revision of Settlement (1888–1893) of the Amritsar District in the Punjab (Lahore: The Civil and Military Gazette Press, 1893), BL, IOR, V/27/314/460, p. 7; Punjab District Gazetteers, vol. 20A: Amritsar District, 1914 (Lahore: Civil and Military Gazette Press, 1914), BL, IOR V/27/67/55, p. 138. 91  Thorburn, The Punjab in Peace and War, p. 183. 92  Davies and Blyth, Report on the Revised Settlement, para. 48, p. 46. 86

Economic Patronage and Military Recruitment89

the wake of the Rebellion and the famine of 1860–1.93 E.A.  Prinsep’s revised settlement of the Amritsar Division, which began in February of 1863, continued this trend of leniency, as he and his officers reduced the regular rent-roll by over half a lakh, excluding an additional reduction of one and a half lakhs obtained by assessing canal villages at unirrigated rates.94 Between 1861 and 1866, revenue demand in Punjab declined steadily as a result of ‘a more liberal policy . . . towards the landholder’ in which government demand was limited to half of the net produce instead of two-thirds.95 By the mid-1860s, this policy of light assessments had even been codified in official literature. Robert Cust’s 1866 Manual for Revenue Officers opened by instructing that the Punjab system was ‘not designed to yield the largest revenue’, but that the government instead, ‘looks for its profit in a contented people’.96 During the revised settlement operations of central Punjab, which began in 1887, Lieutenant-Governor Sir James Lyall even declared that ‘the intention of Government was to facilitate work and disarm opposition by making the assessment in each case decidedly moderate’.97 Thus, in spite of the increasing prosperity of central Punjab over the following decades,98 revenue demand remained moderate, and increases were disproportionate to actual growth. In the Lahore district, settlement officers found that the revised regular settlement conducted by Leslie Saunders and Prinsep from 1864–8 had been so concerned with assuring a lenient rate for Majha landholders that by 1888 they were ‘reaping profits of which only a very small share went to Government, while many of the lowland villages .  .  . were found to be distinctively impoverished’.99 In the Kasur tahsil of the Lahore district, the 1891 settlement officer found that assessment rates were so low compared to the relative prosperity of the tahsil, that he could raise the rates in the Majha Mitha and Majha Khara circles by as much as 90 and 180 per cent, respectively.100 When the Punjab Government expressed ­ reservations  J.M. Douie, Punjab Settlement Manual, 2nd ed. (Lahore: Civil and Military Gazette Press, 1909), BL, IOR, V/27/311/430, p. 27.  PAR 1866–67, para. 95, p. 39. 95  PAR 1864–65, para. 105, pp. 36–7. 96  Robert Cust, Manual for the Guidance of Revenue Officers in the Punjab (Lahore: Koh-INoor Press, 1866), p. 4. 97  This was given especial emphasis in important Sikh military recruiting districts, like Gujranwala: Gazetteer of the Gujranwala District, 1893–94 (Lahore: Civil and Military Gazette Press, 1895), BL, IOR, V/27/67/14, p. 152. 98  Punjab District Gazetteers, vol. 7A: Ambala District, 1923–24, p. 39. 99  Punjab District Gazetteers, vol. 30A: Lahore District, 1916, pp. 187–8. 100  ‘Assessment Report of the Kasur Tahsil’, in Assessment Report of the Lahore District, Punjab State Archives, Chandigarh (PSA), Civil Secretariat Records (CSR)/no. 13, para. 12, p. 7. 93

94

90

Re-Assessing the ‘Garrison State’

about this sudden increase, settlement officials claimed that, ‘compared with the increase in resources it was moderate and perhaps hardly sufficient’.101 In the Tarn Taran tahsil of the Amritsar district, one of the wealthiest and most important military recruiting tracts, assessments rates were also kept artificially low compared to growth. Tarn Taran was one of the few tahsils in which Prinsep had raised the demand in his 1865 revised settlement, but even this represented only a very modest increase of 4 per cent.102 Between 1865 and 1913, revenue rates within the tahsil rose by an average of less than 2 per cent per year.103 During that same period, the total cultivable area for the entire tahsil rose by 8 per cent, irrigation increased by 50 per cent, and prices rose by 48 per cent.104 As the 1912–13 settlement officer H.D. Craik remarked in his report, this assessment ‘was designedly a lenient one’.105 In the case of the Lahore tahsil, the 1892 settlement officer, G.C. Walker, noted that ‘the continual tendency has been to reduce rather than increase the revenue demand on each estate’.106 All throughout central Punjab, then, revenue officials went out of their way to accommodate the strategically important Sikh cultivating classes they had tied their interests to following Punjab’s annexation in 1849. As G.M. Ogilvie put it in his 1891 assessment report for the Tarn Taran tahsil, settlement officers were not supposed to calculate and collect what was possible, but what was ‘expedient’.107 The political implications of revenue assessment within the Majha region of central Punjab were also made explicit by the Revenue Secretary to the Punjab Government, R.G. Thomson. In his discussion of the Amritsar tahsil, Thomson stressed ‘how desirable it is to have the Amritsar Tahsíl moderately assessed, being as it is the centre and focus of Sikhism and the very seed plot of opinion’.108 Revenue collection in Punjab, therefore, was always deeply influenced by wider political and strategic considerations. Lenient revenue demands were seen as a way of ensuring rural contentment, especially in districts  Ibid.  G.M. Ogilvie, ‘Review of the Assessment Report of the Tarn Taran Tahsil, 1891’, in Assessment Report of the Amritsar District, 1891–1893, PSA, CSR/no. 10, para. 2, p. 1, 103  As late as 1911, revenue had risen to a mere Rs. 412,652, and this only increased in 1912–13 to Rs. 540,900, a jump of 31 per cent: H.D. Craik, ‘Assessment Report of the Tarn Taran Tahsil’ and ‘Statement no. XVI. – Revenue Collections’, in Assessment Report of the Amritsar District, 1912–13, PSA, CSR/no. 32, p. xxviii. 104  Ibid., para. 74, p. 43. 105  Qtd. in Punjab District Gazetteers, vol. 20A: Amritsar District, 1914, p. 140. 106  G.C. Walker, ‘Assessment Report of the Lahore Tahsil’, in Assessment Report of the Lahore District, 1891–93, PSA, CSR/no. 13 para. 15, p. 7. 107  Ogilvie, ‘Review of the Assessment Report of the Tarn Taran Tahsil, 1891’, para. 1, p. 1. 108  Thomson to the Punjab Financial Commissioner, 7 July 1892, in Assessment Report of the Amritsar District, 1891–93, p. 16. 101 102

Economic Patronage and Military Recruitment91

heavily populated by Jat Sikhs. As a result of uneven increases in revenue demands compared to actual growth and prosperity, this group became one of the wealthiest and most powerful in Punjab, further cementing their absolutely essential importance in propping up the colonial state. The other crucial component in tying Sikh loyalty to the British colonial state was the issue of military recruitment. Between 1849 and 1856, many Punjab administrators envisioned the pacification of the turbulent Majha Sikhs almost exclusively in terms of converting them into peaceable farmers. The Rebellion of 1857, however, opened up the possibility that this project could be supplemented and even accelerated through the recruitment of Punjabi soldiers into the army. Punjab officials, as we have seen, were well aware that the disbandment of the Khalsa army in 1849 had deprived many Majha families of the additional income derived from military salaries and pensions, and that this had not only placed an enormous amount of strain on the land, but had been a leading cause of rural discontent: the sudden pacification of the Province after Annexation, the cessation of Military and Political employment, which occupied many thousands of persons and caused money to circulate in the villages, induced large numbers to devote themselves to agriculture. Formerly a proportion of the agricultural classes were engaged in war and service of various kinds, and thus they supported themselves, and contributed to the support of those who tilled the ground at home. But now the entire support of these classes fell upon the land.109

Permitting large numbers of Sikhs once again to enlist in the army would thus not only help to accommodate the manpower needs of the military, but it also made great economic and political sense. Military enlistment would relieve population pressure on the land by offering alternative employment and create a supplementary dynamic for the circulation and distribution of wealth via military salaries and pensions. British military recruitment in Punjab was never evenly distributed, and certain regions and groups benefited disproportionately. Most historical treatments of the uneven distribution of military recruiting markets in Punjab have tended to focus on the role of the martial races theory of the late nineteenth century as the driving factor behind these exclusionist enlistment practices.110 What many of these studies fail to take into adequate account, however, is the degree to which these later policies of recruitment were embedded in various perceptions and discourses of pacification that permeated the early Punjab administration. As we

 PAR 1854–55 & 1855–56, para. 45, pp. 27–8.  Omissi, The Sepoy and the Raj, p. 24. See also Cohen, The Indian Army, chap. 2.

109 110

92

Re-Assessing the ‘Garrison State’

have already seen, Jat Sikhs from central Punjab were singled out as one of Punjab’s most martial and politically important classes. According to Richard Temple, Jats from the Amritsar district formed the very heart of the ‘Sikh commonwealth’. ‘Its peasantry’, Temple continued, ‘are strong-handed and enterprising, the vast majority consisting of the Jut tribes, who by their staunchness and devotion, upheld the Sikh power’.111 Because they had formed the backbone of Ranjit Singh’s armed forces, Jat Sikhs also represented one of the largest, most disaffected groups following the disbandment of the Khalsa army. This, combined with the enormous pressure that had been placed on the crowded districts of the Majha as many former soldiers attempted to return to the soil, quickly made Punjab officials realise that these Sikhs would make one of the best choices to be recruited into the British Indian Army. Even before the Rebellion, many colonial officials had recognised the expediency of incorporating certain of the more martial elements of Punjabi society into the regular army. In a letter to the Court of Directors from July 1850, Dalhousie claimed that the recruitment of Majha Sikhs ‘will undoubtedly lead directly to the diminution of crimes of violence and robbery in the upper districts of the Punjab, while it will, at the same time, afford an additional security against insurrectionary movements among the classes and in the districts where they are most to be apprehended’.112 The overriding conventional wisdom after two separate wars fought in the province, however, was that it would be dangerous to allow too many Sikhs to be enlisted, and it was not until 1863 that all restrictions limiting the enlistment of Punjabis generally were finally rescinded. Yet even before the lifting of this numerical cap on recruitment removed all further barriers for mass Punjabi enlistment, Punjab officials were already optimistically reporting by 1859 that as many as 60,000 Punjabis were now employed by the government, and that a significant portion of those salaries derived from military employment were again being fed back into the rural economy. ‘Much of their earnings finds its way back to the homestead of the soldier, so lately a revenue paying yeoman’, wrote the Punjab Government, ‘and goes a long way towards defraying

 Temple to McLeod, 12 August 1856, in Davies and Blyth, Report on the Revised Settlement, p. 12. 112  Prior to this, the Court of Directors had been quite uneasy about recruiting Sikhs into the army, but Dalhousie recognised that it was ‘desirable to open as many channels of employment as possible’, until the construction on the Bari Doab Canal could begin: Military Letter from the GG, 4 July 1850, PP, 1857–8 (129) XLIII.123, Orders Issued by Court of Directors Regarding Castes of Hindoos from which Native Army is Recruited, 5 February 1858, p. 14. 111

Economic Patronage and Military Recruitment93

the liabilities of his village’.113 In total, these salaries amounted to an estimated 72 lakhs, or nearly half of the total land tax, so they represented an important source of supplementary income for these families.114 In the case of the Jat Sikhs of the Majha, these salaries remitted from military service were key to their expanding prosperity throughout the nineteenth century.115 The Tarn Taran tahsil of the Amritsar district, for example, with its strong tradition of military service, became one of the wealthiest in central Punjab over several decades, despite the fact that it was one of the most crowded and over-cultivated tracts.116 The 1914 Amritsar District Gazetteer, for instance, estimated that at least 6,000 men from this district were in military employ, with a further 2,000 receiving pensions, amounting to a total income of roughly 25 lakhs per year.117 In addition to supplementing family income for the improvement of their land, retired sepoys and native officers were often able to buy mortgaged land with the help of their pensions, and others were even able to strike out into new forms of military-related entrepreneurship by establishing businesses as local village money lenders. ‘There are few villages which do not contain Jats who lend money on the security of land’, wrote the settlement officer in 1891: They are often sepoys and native officers who have retired on pension. In fact, it may be said that there are very few Sikh Jats who have before retiring risen to the ranks of non-commissioned officers who do not on their return to their houses proceed to acquire land on mortgage; and they are always to be counted as among the better-off members of the community.118

 PAR 1858–59, para. 24, p. 12.  As Clive Dewey has demonstrated in his study of the Upper Sind Sagar Doab, supplementing agricultural proceeds with military incomes crucially allowed families to expand their agricultural holdings and raise their general standard of living: Dewey, ‘Some Consequences of Military Expenditure’, p. 117. 115  After this recruiting cap was lifted, Jats were among the first groups to be enlisted into the army in large numbers: ‘PG to the GOI’, 7 April 1863, NAI, Military A/April 1863/ Bundle no. 1481, no. 80, para. 1, p. 1. 116  According to the 1893 Amritsar Assessment Report: ‘The traditions of the tahsíl are intimately connected with military service, and it is still a very favourite recruiting ground . . . in the Central Mánjha, all but perhaps the very smallest villages have men in service. One-third of the total land revenue of the tahsíl goes to the small post office of Sirháli alone to pay the money-orders sent home by sepoys and men serving in the Burma Military Police, and there is no doubt that service under Government affords a valuable outlet in a tract with small holdings and an increasing population. The pensions earned by retired sepoys also add largely to the total income’: ‘Assessment Report of the Tarn Taran Tahsil’, in Assessment Report of the Amritsar District, 1891–1893. PSA, CSR/no. 10, para. 29, p. 16. 117  Punjab District Gazetteers, vol. 20A: Amritsar District, p. 162. 118  ‘Assessment Report of the Tarn Taran Tahsil’, para. 40, p. 21. 113 114

94

Re-Assessing the ‘Garrison State’

Through a combination of shrewd business practices and their privileged status, Jat Sikhs solidified their hold on land and wealth in central Punjab. Between 1891 and 1914, these Sikhs increased their monopoly on land ownership between 64 and 84 per cent, depending on the particular region.119 Of the 7,400 men recruited from Ambala district during the First World War, two-thirds of these came from the ‘main land-­owning tribes’, foremost among whom were the Jat Sikhs.120 From the outset, colonial administrators in Punjab were beset by the complex problem of how to transform thousands of former enemies into quiescent subjects, loyal to the colonial state. Through a combination of public works projects, lenient revenue assessments, and preferential military recruitment, the Punjab Government largely succeeded in creating a steadfast class of soldier-agriculturalists. This reciprocal pattern between agricultural and military patronage helped transform the province into the garrison state that would help the British weather numerous other imperial crises, including the Rebellion of 1857. At the same time, however, it placed unprecedented importance on the continued appeasement and contentment of militarily and politically important groups, such as the Jat Sikhs of central Punjab. As we shall see in the following section, this overwhelming dependence remained a constant source of tension and anxiety for the colonial state. British officials feared that any threat or disruption to this delicate balance might turn their newfound allies against them, and once again unleash their ‘warlike’ and ‘predatory’ ­tendencies against the colonial state. 2.5

The Punjab Disturbances of 1907

During a tour of the recently settled Jhelum Colony in April of 1906, Viceroy Lord Minto wrote to John Morley, the Secretary of State for India, marvelling at how a once ‘arid desert’ could be transformed into a ‘land of plenty’.121 Yet, aside from being a feat of British engineering and agricultural ingenuity, Minto was also keenly aware of how the colony was also a testament to the enduring legacy and influence of the military importance of Punjab.122 While visiting the newly established town of Sargodha, the colony’s headquarters, Minto had an opportunity to  Assessment Report of the Amritsar District, 1912–13 (Lahore: Punjab Government Press, 1914), PSA, CSR/no. 32; Assessment Report of the Lahore District, 1914 (Lahore: Punjab Government Press, 1914), PSA, CSR/no. 36. 120  Punjab District Gazetteers, vol. 7A: Ambala District, 1923–24, p. 118. 121  Minto Morley, 9 April 1906, BL, IOR, Mss Eur D573/8, fp. 2. 122  The Jhelum Colony was located in the Shahpur District, and was settled between 1902 and 1906. It covered a total area of 1,531,000 acres, much of which was used for 119

The Punjab Disturbances of 190795

take in an afternoon of sporting events, and remarked how the crowd was composed almost entirely of former soldiers who had fought for the British: It really was the most impressive scene. They were wearing nearly every medal one had ever heard of. The Mutiny medal, China, Egypt, Abyssinia, East Africa, South Africa, Somaliland, Afghan Campaigns, Frontier Campaigns, Tibet, etc. I went round them all and spoke to as many as ever I could. One fine old fellow had fought against us in the Sikh Wars and afterwards joined us and was one of the heroic garrison of the Bailey Guard in the defence of the Residency at Lucknow. The old man was delighted at being talked to. One really felt one was amongst a race of warriors and could not but feel proud of the huge possessions and responsibilities, the defence of which these medals of innumerable ­campaigns bore witness.123

But even while Minto was writing in praise of the Punjabi soldiery, a crisis was brewing that would threaten to turn these same stalwarts and guardians of British rule into one its greatest threats. In 1907, Punjab was rocked by one of the most serious and widespread agitations against British rule since the Rebellion of 1857.124 The catalyst for these protests was the notorious Colonisation Bill of 1906, a proposed amendment to the 1893 Punjab Colonisation of Land Act, that threatened to retroactively alter the conditions of the grants held by the inhabitants of the Chenab canal colony.125 In addition to enforcing a strict policy of primogeniture to prevent holdings from being fragmented and sub-divided between multiple sons, the Bill offered formal sanction to a deeply unpopular yet hitherto informal system of fines that had been employed to enforce the various regulations governing the colony.126 primarily military purposes, such as horse-breeding: Ali, The Punjab Under Imperialism, pp. 23–9. 123  Minto Morley, 9 April 1906, BL, IOR, Mss Eur D573/8, fp. 2. 124  The most detailed account of the Punjab Disturbances of 1907 remains N. Gerald Barrier, ‘The Punjab Disturbances of 1907: The Response of the British Government to Agrarian Unrest’, Modern Asian Studies, 1:4 (July 1967): pp. 353–83. See also Tan, The Garrison State, pp. 92–6; Ali, The Punjab under Imperialism, pp. 66–70. 125  Begun in 1887, the Chenab Colony was the largest of Punjab’s canal projects, covering an area of over 2 million acres that stretched over the southern section of the Rechna Doab. The colony was settled between 1892 and 1905 by ‘loyal’ Sikh, Muslim, and Hindu grantees from Amritsar, Gurdaspur, Jullundur, Sialkot, and Hoshiarpur districts. A large number of these grantees had connections with the military: Ali, The Punjab under Imperialism, pp. 18–23. 126  After it was discovered that many of the colonists were evading residency requirements, illegally cutting trees, building houses on farming plots, and failing to meet the prescribed sanitation requirements, colony officers began to issue fines instead of resorting to the outright confiscation of these misbehaving grantees. These fines, however, quickly became a way to extort money from the colonists by corrupt lower officials within the colony’s administration, leading to widespread discontent and hostility among

96

Re-Assessing the ‘Garrison State’

Additional discontent generated by the failure of the 1905–6 cotton crop and an increase in water rates in 1906 impelled Sikh, Muslim, and Hindu colonists to unite in early February of 1907 to oppose the Bill and the deteriorating conditions within the colony.127 Initially confined to the Chenab colony, unrest quickly spread to the central districts of Punjab through familial networks, and what had begun as an agrarian protest was gradually transformed into a much more widespread agitation in which both rural and urban protesters took part in mass demonstrations against the government. Indian nationalist leaders, including Lala Lajpat Rai and Ajit Singh, seized on the momentum generated by the unrest in order to agitate for their own political agendas, newspapers like the Punjabee published inflammatory anti-government articles, and riots broke out in the cities of Amritsar, Lahore, and Rawalpindi. Faced with such widespread and sustained disaffection, LieutenantGovernor Denzil Ibbetson wrote urgently to the Government of India on 30 April 1907, imploring them to grant him extended executive powers to ban public meetings, shut down seditious presses, and to arrest and deport Lajpat Rai and Ajit Singh as the ringleaders of the agitation. ‘Such are the powers’, Ibbetson wrote, ‘which I deem to be essential in order to enable me to cope with a situation that is already dangerous, and the danger of which is almost daily increasing’.128 Ibbetson was emphatic that the government must act decisively and swiftly, lest any delay be interpreted as a sign of weakness and encourage further acts of rebellion.129 ‘The one thing that we cannot afford to do is to remain inactive’, he continued.130 Finally, in a thinly-veiled rebuke to the dismantling of the executive prerogatives that had previously been enjoyed by Punjab’s administrators,131 Ibbetson concluded his Minute by claiming that if ‘the powers for which I now ask had from the first been enjoyed by Government, the evil could and would have been repressed in its first the colonists. As James Dunlop-Smith, the private secretary to Minto, later put it, ‘in India for one man who is fined by an executive authority ten men have paid blackmail to underlings to escape being fined’: Supplementary Note, n.d., BL, IOR, Mss Eur F/166/40, para. 7, fp. 35. 127  Barrier, ‘The Punjab Disturbances’, p. 365. 128  Minute by Sir Denzil Ibbetson on the Political Situation in that Province, 30 April 1907, BL, IOR, P/7590, para. 26, fp. 7. 129  As he put it, ‘it is human to enjoy seeing a foreign Government heckled. Their interests are bound up with order and security; and their sympathies would be wholly with a strong Government, if Government would only be strong. If it is weak, however, they will inevitably join the opposition, if only for the sake of peace. They are standing now, waiting for us to strike; and every day that we delay renders our position weaker’: ibid., para. 19, fp. 5. 130  Ibid., para. 27, fp. 7. 131  See Chapter 3.

The Punjab Disturbances of 190797

beginnings. As it is, I am compelled to sit inactive and watch the infection spreading, because I have no preventive powers, while punitive measures do more harm than good’.132 Ibbetson’s response was based on his firm (yet ultimately flawed) belief that these demonstrations were the product of a concerted plot on the part of urban agitators like Lajpat Rai and Ajit Singh to overthrow British rule, and not the result of widely-held grievances and opposition to the Colonisation Bill among large sections of Punjabi society.133 Reports that these agitators were attempting to spread sedition and disaffection within the ranks of the Indian Army, particularly among Sikh regiments, were especially alarming.134 Indeed, these concerns about a potential army mutiny seemed all the more foreboding as the fiftieth anniversary of the outbreak of ‘Mutiny’ of 1857 on 10 May loomed just on the horizon.135 For Ibbetson, the extreme danger of this situation was unmistakable. By undermining the support of Punjab’s strategically vital soldier-cultivators, Ibbetson feared the protest movement threatened to overturn the entire military-agrarian nexus upon which British power in India was based: The Punjabi is no doubt less hysterical than the Bengali. But he is not exempt from the defects of the East. Credulous to a degree which it is difficult for us to understand; traditionally disposed to believe evil of his Government; difficult to rouse, perhaps, but emotional, and inflammable, when once roused; he affords ground admirably adapted to the purposes of the political agitator, especially when some local grievance may have predisposed him to discontent. In the case of the Sikhs, the danger is especially great. It is only 60 years since they ruled the Punjab; it was largely their loyal help that enabled us to put down the mutiny; they occupy all the centre of the province; they supply a large and important portion of our native army; and a religious movement has lately made considerable progress among them which tends towards solidarity and pride of class, and will render them more powerful, whether for good or evil. The very sturdiness of the Punjabi, which makes him more difficult to move than the Bengali, makes the matter far more serious when he is moved; and if the loyalty of the Jat Sikhs of the Punjab is ever materially shaken, the danger will be greater than any which could possibly arise in Bengal.136

Ibbetson’s Minute is a striking illustration of the systemic anxieties and fears that wracked the colonial administration in Punjab. Not only did it reproduce age-old concerns about the credulity and propensity of

 Minute by Ibbetson, 30 April 1907, BL, IOR, P/7590, para. 28, fp. 7.  Barrier, ‘The Punjab Disturbances’, p. 368. 134  Minute by Ibbetson, BL, IOR, P/7590, para. 11, fpp. 2–3. 135  Barrier, ‘The Punjab Disturbances’, p. 371. 136  Minute by Ibbetson, BL, IOR, P/7590, para. 22, fp. 5. 132 133

98

Re-Assessing the ‘Garrison State’

Indians to rebel, but it also gave vivid expression to the profound fears of Punjab officials that the same ‘warlike’ groups, particularly the Sikhs, who helped maintain colonial rule could just as easily overthrow it. Ibbetson’s panicked request for increased executive powers met with a mixed response from the GOI. On the one hand, neither Minto nor the CINC Lord Kitchener believed the situation was as critical as Ibbetson made it out to be. Nevertheless, Minto was a great admirer of Ibbetson and respected his considerable expertise. He was also uneasy about undermining the authority of the Punjab Government by failing to support the Colonisation Bill. As a result, after a heated debate within his Executive Council, Minto conceded that ‘ordinary law’ was evidently insufficient to deal with the current crisis, and granted Ibbetson the powers he requested, including the right to deport Lajpat Rai and Ajit Singh under the notorious Regulation III of 1818.137 Armed with these new powers, the Punjab Government prohibited public meetings, sometimes dispersing them using force, and sued newspapers accused of publishing anti-government and other seditious materials. Still, the unrest continued, and Ibbetson was eventually called away to London due to health reasons, meaning that the onus for quelling the disturbances now fell squarely upon the shoulders of Minto and his Council. Initially somewhat sceptical of Ibbetson’s claims that the unrest had nothing to do with the Colonisation Bill, Minto now became increasingly convinced that Ibbetson had been severely mistaken, and an independent investigation into discontent within the army launched by Kitchener subsequently confirmed that the main source of disaffection was, in fact, the new law. Finally, on 26 May 1907, at the insistence of Kitchener, Morley, and many others, Minto assented and vetoed the Bill, at the risk of weakening the authority of the Punjab Government.138 Indian reaction to Minto’s veto and the Bill’s defeat was jubilant. Newspapers praised the decision as a testament to British justice, and pledges of support for the government poured in from across Punjab. Yet, even within this atmosphere of celebration and renewed British support, there were numerous reminders of just how very near the government had come to the brink of a complete disaster during this crisis. Writing to the GOI in June of 1907, Muhammad Shafi, a member of the Zamindars Association of Lahore, conveyed the ‘universal satisfaction’ that the Bill’s defeat had brought to the people, and expressed his utmost pride to be a part of the ‘glorious British Empire’. Nevertheless, Shafi ended his letter by sounding a cautionary note and reminding the  GOI to the PG, 7 May 1907, BL, IOR, P/7590, para. 2, fp. 93.  Barrier, ‘The Punjab Disturbances’, p. 374.

137 138

The Punjab Disturbances of 190799

government of the ‘undeniable fact’ that the stability of that same empire rested on the contentment of Punjab, and that ‘a deep-rooted discontent amongst the agricultural classes is fraught with the possibilities of grave danger’.139 For the colonial authorities themselves, one of the most unsettling aspects of the disturbances was that such a large section of Punjab’s most well-treated and ostensibly ‘loyal’ agrarian communities could have turned against them. As Major Popham Young, a Settlement Commissioner who toured the Chenab Colony in the wake of the agitation, put it: ‘only a short month ago the most violently mutinous sentiments were openly expressed by men who owe practically everything they possess to the British Raj, and that many agriculturalists, mostly Jat Sikhs in close connection with the Native Army, were amongst the most violent and the most disloyal’.140 Thus, while Young was able to report that things were now much calmer in the colony, he noted how a feeling of bitterness still remained and that the British should have no delusions that they could ever be entirely safe from a similar rising in the future. The lessons of 1907 were certainly not lost on Minto. Writing to Morley three years later about the recent and difficult revenue settlement operations conducted in Punjab, Minto confessed: ‘I look upon the future administration of that Province with downright apprehension’. ‘Revenue and land settlement questions are extremely delicate’, he continued, ‘and when they affect a manly warlike population are, if mismanaged, full of risk’.141 The Punjab Disturbances of 1907 provided a vivid demonstration of what could occur if the delicate balance between the British colonial state and its crucial soldier-cultivators was upset. As such, it also served as an indelible reminder to colonial officials about the perennially precarious situation that existed in India, and that even the most ‘loyal’ sections of Indian society could turn again them. Nor was this an isolated incident. During the Akali movement of 1920–5, armed bands of Akali Sikhs known as jathas attempted to seize gurudwaras (Sikh places of ­worship) and made concerted efforts to raise rebellion in the important military recruitment districts of central Punjab, once again underlining  The Punjab Colonies. A Memorandum by Muhammad Shafi, Barrister-at-Law, 29 June 1907, BL, IOR, Mss Eur D573/12, para. 5, fp. 38.  ‘The fact then has to be faced’, Young continued, ‘that, although we are dealing with a community who have more reason for gratitude towards the Government than any other subjects of the Indian Empire, we cannot rely on their steadfast loyalty if agitators are loosed amongst them, if facial and religious prejudices are inflamed and if their grievances, real or imaginary, are enlarged upon in newspapers and on public platforms’: Confidential Note on the Administration of the Chenab Colony by Major Popham Young, 21 July 1907, ibid., fp. 40. 141  Minto to Morley, 26 May 1910, BL, IOR, Mss Eur D573/24, fp. 57. 139

140

100

Re-Assessing the ‘Garrison State’

the potentially disastrous consequences if the Sikh peasantry and soldiery were not kept content.142 Even CINC Henry Rawlinson, who was deeply dismissive of the Indian nationalist movement and the ability of Indians to effectively oppose to the British, conceded at the height of Akali outbreak that the one real threat they faced in India was from Punjab: ‘the home of the fighting Sikh’.143 Thus, while Punjab may have been British India’s garrison state and the guarantor of colonial security, this same responsibility and importance made it one the most anxious and insecure colonial administrations, one that was acutely aware of its own vulnerability to a population it both depended upon and feared. 2.6 Conclusion On the evening of 10 April, 1919, just three days before Jallianwala Bagh Massacre, Lieutenant-Governor Michael O’Dwyer attended a party that had been thrown in his honour at Montgomery Hall in Lahore. Here, in front of a mixed audience of British colonial officers and Punjabi ­soldiers, O’Dwyer praised the martial spirit of the Punjabis: I am glad to think that the excitement of this evening has not prevented us from meeting here to-night. I am proud to meet in this unique gathering so many representatives of the great martial races, Mahomedan, Sikh and Hindu, of the Punjab who, though differing in origin, religion and social customs, are united to one another and to the British Government by two bonds of steel, the bonds of loyalty and valour.144

After extolling the virtues of Punjab’s martial races, O’Dwyer continued by making an appeal to these same individuals to help put down the protests and rioting that was occurring across the province. ‘The trouble’, O’Dwyer declared, ‘though serious, is not widespread and with your help will soon be dispelled. It will be a proud memory to me that in time of war or of internal trouble I never appealed to the martial races of the Punjab in vain’.145  For more on the Akali movement, see Tan, The Garrison State, chap. 5; Richard G. Fox, Lions of the Punjab: Culture in the Making (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1985), chap. 5. 143  However, despite acknowledging the threat posed by the Akalis, Rawlinson also believed, in classic divide-and-rule fashion, that any sort of general Sikh rising could be defeated by enlisting Muslims to fight against them: ‘Even to-day there is a danger of a Sikh rising . . . but, if the Sikhs who are Hindus did rise, you would at once have a larger number of Mohammedans flocking to your standards to crush the Sikh. A nation divided against itself cannot stand, and that is India’: Rawlinson to Stanley, 19 June 1923, BL, IOR, Mss Eur D605, fp. 177–8. 144  Punjab Disturbances, April 1919, p. 5. 145  Ibid., p. 8. 142

Conclusion101

Ironically, however, it was these very same martial qualities that also provided one of the greatest causes for alarm during the Punjab disturbances of 1919. Indeed, one of the primary justifications offered by the Punjab Government for the imposition and continuation of martial law after 15 April was that Punjabis ‘are of a more martial temperament than those in other parts of the country, and are more readily influenced by agitation to take action’.146 During the debate over the controversial Indemnity Bill proposed following the disturbances, W.M. Hailey, the future Lieutenant-Governor, similarly supported the decision to impose martial law on the grounds that the British were dealing ‘with a warlike, virile, martial people, suddenly filled with a spirit of disorder’.147 With hundreds of thousands of men recently demobilised after the war, and a province seething with discontent,148 the Punjab authorities did indeed have good reason to worry. In the end, however, O’Dwyer’s appeal was not in vain. The disturbances remained confined primarily to urban areas, and the vast majority of Punjab’s vital soldier-cultivators stayed loyal to the British.149 Yet even so, authorities could not help but be reminded of the very real danger that might have arisen had there been more rural support for the agitation. As the Deputy Commissioner of Amritsar, Miles Irving, so soberly put it: ‘If the villagers of the Manjha had turned loose, we should have had a situation not paralleled since the Mutiny. We know them to be hot-headed men, who, if they thought that the Government was failing, would step in for anything they could get.’150 Punjab’s garrison state was both a boon and a burden for colonial authorities. On the one hand, the promotion of military-agrarian interests helped furnish the colonial state with loyal recruits for its armies, and also helped insulate Punjab against the growth of the nationalist movement by entrenching representatives from these preferred groups in the provincial legislatures created by the 1919 and 1935 Government of India Acts. Indeed, it was the ability of the British to come to terms with these Punjabi middle farmers, both before and after the Rebellion, that allowed British rule to survive in India. But on the other hand, the Punjab Government’s complete reliance on these same groups

 Hunter Committee Report, para. 15, p. 72.  Extract from the Proceedings of the Indian Legislative Council, 19 September 1919, BL, IOR, Mss Eur F137/32, fp. 26. 148  Hunter Committee Report, para. 19, p. 73. 149  Rajit K. Mazumder, ‘From Loyalty to Dissent: Punjabis from the Great War to World War II’, in Kaushik Roy (ed.), The Indian Army in the Two World Wars (Boston, MA: Brill, 2012), pp. 469–70. 150  Qtd. in PP, 1920 (Cmd. 771) XXXIV.677, Disturbances in the Punjab: Statement by ­Brig.-General R.E. Dyer, C.B, p. 16. 146 147

102

Re-Assessing the ‘Garrison State’

ultimately restricted its ability to enact policy, as was evidenced with the Colonisation Bill agitation of 1906–7. Indeed, the problematic l­egacies this military-agrarian complex can be most strikingly witnessed in the case of postcolonial Pakistan, where contemporary politics are still largely dominated by an overly powerful military establishment with close links to landed interests.151 Yet despite this widespread acknowledgment of the profound importance and lasting influence of Punjab’s garrison state, existing scholarship has neglected to recognise the extent to which its development was shaped by the anxious and uncertain circumstances colonial administrators found themselves in immediately following the annexation of the province in 1849. Faced with the mass demobilisation of the former Sikh army, rising rates of crime, the depression of agricultural prices, and widespread rural disaffection, Punjab administrators became convinced that the best way to avert the outbreak of a rebellion and to secure the future security of the province was to ensure the prosperity and contentment of the politically and militarily important Jat Sikhs of central Punjab. This reciprocating pattern of patronage would later be replicated and expanded to other important groups throughout the province, including the Muslim landowning tribes of western Punjab and even certain select Hindus castes.152 The ‘Punjab tradition’ of patronising the province’s military-agrarian classes, therefore, began well before the Rebellion of 1857, and was firmly rooted in the ways that anxious colonial officials framed and responded to the problems of organising and pacifying a civil society in the wake of the destruction of the former Sikh kingdom. At the heart of Punjab’s formidable garrison state lay a deep-rooted and pervasive disquiet about the potential for the province’s warlike inhabitants to overthrow their colonial overlords. To contain the threat of rebellion, colonial administrators attempted to tie the interests of Punjab’s agrarian classes to their own. The great irony of this was that the more dependent the British became on securing the goodwill of these groups in order to prop up their rule – both in Punjab and beyond – the more restless and sensitive they became to any potential threats that might upset this delicate balance. Sikhs, in particular, occupied an uneasy position between being colonial allies and potentially its greatest adversaries. As a result, far from being a formidable security state, Punjab was actually a perennially insecure and, in some ways, fairly weak colonial administration that was held hostage by the very same subjects who were supposed to ensure its safety.  Jalal, The State of Martial Rule; Ahmed, The Pakistan Garrison State.  See Tan, The Garrison State; Ali, The Punjab Under Imperialism.

151 152

3

Law, the Punjab School, and the ‘Kooka Outbreak’ of 1872

Despotism is good, if it can be pure and energetic; each petty chief in the Punjāb is a despot; I was one; and if my ability could have equalled my intention, I might, during even my short career, have effected much good. Henry Lawrence, Adventures of an Officer in the Service of Runjeet Singh1

3.1 Introduction On the afternoon of 17 January 1872, the Deputy Commissioner of the Ludhiana district in Punjab, John Lambert Cowan, ordered the s­ ummary execution of 49 Namdhari Sikhs (known in pejorative colonial terminology as ‘Kookas’ or ‘Kukas’) by blowing them away from the mouths of artillery guns. The Namdharis in question had recently attacked the Muslim princely state of Malerkotla, and their actions, according to Cowan, constituted an act of open rebellion that necessitated a ‘terrible and prompt punishment’ if the safety of the British colonial state was to be maintained.2 Cowan’s handling of the ‘Kooka outbreak’ of 1872 was one of the most spectacular and violent displays of colonial authority since the Rebellion of 1857. However, whereas the executions of the sepoy mutineers in 1857 were widely supported by both British officials and the public alike, the violence perpetrated against the Namdharis proved to be a much more divisive and bitterly contested affair. In addition to drawing unfavourable comparisons to the sensational imperial scandal surrounding Governor Edward Eyre’s brutal suppression of the 1865 Morant Bay Uprising in Jamaica,3 the executions sat uncomfortably alongside a renewed cautiousness among colonial officials in India about  Henry Lawrence, Adventures of an Officer in the Service of Runjeet Singh, 2 vols. (London: Henry Colburn, 1845), vol. 2, p. 233. 2  Cowan to Forsyth, 17 January 1872, PP, 1872 (356) XLV.645, Correspondence Relating to Kooka Outbreak, p. 16 [hereafter Kooka Outbreak]. 3  Kostal, Jurisprudence of Power. 1

103

104

Law, the Punjab School, and the ‘Kooka Outbreak’ of 1872

transgressing the bounds of the law that had proliferated as a result of the codification movement of the 1860s and early 1870s. With its vigorous emphasis on the rule of law, one of the main goals of codification was to provide a check against the abuses of unrestrained executive authority.4 Cowan’s decision to summarily execute the Namdharis was therefore not just a shocking example of colonial brutality, but ran counter to the moral and legal principles that British colonial rule claimed to uphold. As a result, instead of being celebrated as heroes, both Cowan and his direct superior, Commissioner T.D. Forsyth, were severely reprimanded by the GOI and became the focus of a sustained and acrimonious controversy in both the British Indian and metropolitan press. Although Kim Wagner’s notion of the ‘Mutiny’ motif and his more recent work on the similarities between the 1919 Jallianwala Bagh Massacre and the ‘Kooka outbreak’ itself provide a useful starting point for understanding the colonial violence perpetrated against the Namdharis,5 this chapter offers an alternative examination of this incident by positioning it within a detailed exploration of the Punjab School of colonial governance and its strange, often fraught, relationship with the rule of law. For many contemporary observers, Cowan and Forsyth symbolised the deeply problematic and atavistic tendencies of the Punjab School. Immediately following its annexation in 1849, Punjab was placed under a deeply authoritarian and ‘paternalistic’ form of government. Eschewing the ponderous procedural practices of India’s ‘regulation’ provinces, the Punjab system was based on a remarkably flexible understanding and interpretation of a set of basic administrative precepts.6 Officers were meant to rule directly from a position of both moral and physical strength, in the belief that the swift execution of justice would more easily win the allegiance of Punjab’s ‘rural’ population over to the British.7 Though initially widely celebrated throughout India for its energy and efficiency, the Punjab School found itself increasingly under pressure from the 1860s to align with the ideals of codification, and ‘­regulation’ governance more generally, that were being promoted elsewhere in the subcontinent. The Punjab Government, however,   Sandra den Otter, ‘“A Legislating Empire”: Victorian Political Theorists, Codes of Law, and Empire’, in Duncan Bell (ed.), Victorian Visions of Global Order: Empire and International Relations in Nineteenth-Century Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 89–112. 5  Wagner, ‘“Treading Upon Fires”’; Wagner, ‘“Calculated to Strike Terror”’. 6  Andrew J. Major, Return to Empire: Punjab under the Sikhs and British in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (New Delhi: Sterling Publishers, 1996), pp. 125–6; L.S.S. O’Malley, The Indian Civil Service 1601–1930 (London: John Murray, 1931), pp. 58–9; John Beames, Memoirs of a Bengal Civilian (London: Chatto & Windus, 1961), pp. 101–3. 7  Talbot, The Punjab and the Raj, p. 34. 4

The Militant Origins of the Punjab School105

­ isplayed a marked and persistent resistance to doing so, claiming that d the province’s ‘warlike’ and ‘turbulent’ inhabitants could be controlled only through a strong, uncompromising, and personalised style of rule. This was an argument that would be repeated again and again by Punjab officials in the aftermath of the ‘Kooka outbreak’ in order to justify and explain the brutal suppression of the uprising. According to this logic, Cowan’s decision – flawed and excessive as it may have been – derived from an absolutely fundamental executive privilege that could not be dismantled without placing the very safety of the entire colonial regime in jeopardy. The British response to the ‘Kooka outbreak’, and the ensuing controversy it generated, offer an important glimpse not only of the violent workings of colonial governance in Punjab, but of the deep-seated political and legal tensions that existed at the heart of colonial rule in India following the Rebellion of 1857. As we shall see, British ideals about the rule of law in India competed alongside an equally important and arguably more urgent imperative that insisted that, as a ‘regime of conquest’, the colonial government needed to preserve an ‘illimitable’ form of ­sovereignty in order to ensure its own safety and stability. Advocates of this position, according to Nasser Hussain, ‘refused to concede that the exercise of such power abrogated the rule of law’ by arguing that even the most seemingly arbitrary and authoritarian acts could be justified in the name of preserving the safety and stability of the colonial regime.8 With its deeply authoritarian ethos and emphasis on the need to preserve the executive power and authority of its officers in the face of a particularly truculent and warlike colonial population, the Punjab School of governance represented one of the most prominent examples of this particular colonial logic. However, far from being a strong, bold, and self-assured form of rule, this chapter argues that the Punjab system, and the more general logic of colonial Indian governance that it embodied, ultimately represented a fundamentally fearful and anxiety-ridden system. 3.2

The Militant Origins of the Punjab School

From the outset, British colonial power in Punjab evoked a distinctly ‘military’ ethos.9 In many ways, the Punjab administration was the culmination of the culture of colonial insecurity and vulnerability that  Hussain, Jurisprudence of Emergency, pp. 5, 7.  Eric Stokes described it as a system that was ‘military in form and spirit’, which attempted to ‘prolong the atmosphere of military conquest’: Eric Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India (1959; Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1982), pp. 243, 268.

8 9

106

Law, the Punjab School, and the ‘Kooka Outbreak’ of 1872

had proliferated during the Company’s wars of expansion against the Mughal successor states, and that had allowed military officers to carve out a prominent position for themselves in Indian governance. Though Governor-General Dalhousie was determined to place Punjab firmly under civilian control, the lack of sufficiently trained civilian officers forced him to fill nearly half of the new province’s administrative positions with political officers.10 As a result, military attitudes and priorities became an important guiding influence within the early Punjab administration.11 This section explores how, despite its professed opposition to military rule, the Punjab Government incorporated these values into its core governing ideologies. The consequence of this, it argues, was the creation of an administration consumed with preventing disorder and rebellion, while maintaining its own safety and security. The mixed nature of the newly-formed Punjab government was initially a source of significant tension for its civilian and military officers, and led to numerous conflicts and disputes between the two factions in the early years of administration. Many civilians, including John Lawrence, doubted the ability of military officers to perform their duties effectively,12 while military officers often resented the encroachments of civilians into an administration they had hitherto dominated during the Residency period prior to 1849.13 The most vocal criticisms of Dalhousie’s new Punjab Government, however, came from outside the administration itself, and were levied by the CINC, Charles Napier. During his time in India between 1841 and 1851, Napier became one of the most trenchant critics of the Company’s civil administration and one of the foremost proponents of direct military rule in India. Prior to his arrival in India, Napier had served as military resident of Cephalonia, the largest of the Ionian islands, ruling essentially as an absolute, military governor. Unencumbered by civilian oversight and review, Napier ruled Cephalonia as his own personal fiefdom, revelling in the fact that the  BL, IOR, H/760.  Talbot, The Punjab and the Raj, p. 34.  Harold Lee, Brothers in the Raj: The Lives of John and Henry Lawrence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 261. 13  Military officers, such as Henry Lumsden and William Hodson, who had served in Punjab during the Residency period under Henry Lawrence prior to the Second AngloSikh War, were similarly unimpressed with and doubtful of the ability of civilians to effectively manage Punjab’s civil government: Charles Allen, Soldier Sahibs:The Men Who Made the North-West Frontier (London: John Murray, 2000), p. 207. After John Lawrence became Chief Commissioner in 1853, certain military officers even considered resigning, rather than serve under Henry Lawrence’s civilian brother. It is interesting to note, however, that as a military man himself, Henry Lawrence did not believe that his difficulties with Dalhousie were the product of some ‘abstract prejudice’ he held against military officers: Letter, 6 October 1854, BL, IOR, Mss Eur F85/60. 10 11 12

The Militant Origins of the Punjab School107

Cephalonians – whom he tended to think of as his ‘children’ – referred to him as ‘despotis’, or tyrant.14 Among Napier’s proudest achievements during his governorship were his contributions to the administration of a particularly military brand of law, which granted him the powers of life and death with no appeal.15 Free from the cumbersome procedure of civil courts, and what he believed were the corrupting influences of local, factious politics, Napier revelled in the efficiency of military law, arguing that it alone could provide ‘true’ justice to the island’s inhabitants.16 In Cephalonia, Napier argued that the Greeks were ideally suited to his particular brand of despotic, military rule on account of their ‘factious’, warlike nature.17 This was an argument he would later bring to India as well. Following the conquest and annexation of Sindh in 1843, Napier successfully lobbied to establish a military administration in the province. Consisting predominantly of soldiers, and subject to military law, Napier’s administration in Sindh was a military despotism in its most absolute sense. Like the Cephalonians, Napier argued that Sindhis required a military administration because they would submit only to a martial form of rule. ‘The people here have no respect for civil servants’, he claimed, and as ‘soldiers themselves, they look to be governed by s­oldiers; a feeling which would make them ready to draw swords if affronted by civil servants’.18 Following its annexation in 1849, Napier turned his attention towards Punjab and argued that, like Cephalonia and Sindh, it, too, required military rule on account of its supposedly warlike and militant inhabitants. In a lengthy memorandum from November 1849, Napier urged Dalhousie to abolish Punjab’s civil government, and to turn control of the province directly over to the military. As he put it, ‘the present system in the Punjab will produce among the people neither peace nor attachment to our rule: no barbarous people will endure a civil Government’.19 Napier’s calls for martial rule in Punjab were premised on the idea that the province existed in a permanent state of potential crisis and emergency that could only be averted by the steely-willed rule of soldiers. To ensure the future safety and stability of the province, he argued that a strict form of martial law, administered by soldiers  W.F.P. Napier, The Life and Opinions of General Sir Charles James Napier, 4 vols. (London: John Murray, 1857), vol. 1, p. 307. 15  H.T. Lambrick, Sir Charles Napier and Sind (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952), p. 3. 16  Napier, Life and Opinions, vol. 1, p. 307. 17  Ibid., pp. 304–5. 18  Ibid., vol. 4, p. 20. 19  Memorandum by the CINC, 27 November 1849, BL, IOR, P/SEC/IND/165, no. 114 of 26 April 1850. 14

108

Law, the Punjab School, and the ‘Kooka Outbreak’ of 1872

imbued with formidable executive authority, was necessary.20 Martial law, as Hussain points out, embodies a fundamental legal paradox: it is ‘the manifestation of both the highest law and of no law at all’.21 As such, it is also the critical moment when the sovereign power to decide is essentially converted into the power to punish and kill.22 ‘Such a state may be one of more, or less injustice, according to the will of those who hold this absolute power’, Napier himself wrote in his 1837 Remarks on Military Law and the Punishment of Flogging, ‘but it is clear that the will of such persons is the law, and that there is no other law’.23 Napier was certainly aware of the heavy burdens that accompanied martial law, and he was actually deeply reluctant about its use in England.24 Nevertheless, he firmly believed that permanent military rule was absolutely necessary in India, particularly in places such as Sindh and Punjab, where danger and disorder could erupt at any moment: ‘we are on a mine whose explosion will be fearful’, he insisted in another letter to Dalhousie, and ‘I cannot help thinking that I am right and that the Punjab is in great danger’.25 Unlike ordinary civil laws, which were designed to ‘gently’ reform aberrant moral behaviour, martial law, according to Napier, was necessary to compel immediate and uncompromising obedience in situations where lawlessness and anarchy would otherwise prevail.26 Both Dalhousie and the newly-established Punjab Government, however, vigorously opposed placing the province under direct military rule, arguing that a civil form of law and administration would be much more suited to the province.27 Although Punjabis were ‘not as highly advanced in  In Sindh, ‘Crime, trial, acquittal or punishment all followed each other in rapid succession’, he wrote, ‘and this course pleases a barbarous people more perhaps than any other’: ibid. 21  Hussain, Jurisprudence of Emergency, p. 102. 22  See Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), pp. 6, 31–2, 181; Hussain, Jurisprudence of Emergency, chap. 4. 23  Charles Napier, Remarks on Military Law and the Punishment of Flogging (London: T. and W. Boone, 1837), p. 2. 24  1839, Napier’s convictions were put to the test after he was given command of the northern district in England during the height of Chartist insurrection. Although Napier was instrumental in supporting the local civil police forces there in suppressing the uprisings, he remained deeply uneasy about this: Napier, Life and Opinions, vol. 2, p. 102. 25  Enclosure in a letter from Dalhousie to Hobhouse, 22 November 1849, BL, IOR, Mss Eur F213/24, fpp. 283–4. 26  Napier, Remarks on Military Law, pp. 9–10. 27  As the Punjab Government put it: ‘We believe that .  .  . a Civil form of Government as distinguished from a military one, is that best suited to the feelings of the people; that the prosperity of India is as much due to it, and that we have gained by it as much in the feelings and regards of the people, as it is possible for a conquering race so dissimilar in religion, customs and habits, to do. The justice and good faith of our 20

The Militant Origins of the Punjab School109

civilization as the people of Europe’, the Punjab Government argued, ‘they understand and appreciate the forms of Civil Government, and were accustomed under their own rulers to see leaders and officers of the army as distinct from those of justice and finance’.28 Moreover, contrary to Napier’s assertion that martial law was cheaper and more efficient, the Punjab Government argued that civilians could dispense justice more swiftly than their soldierly counterparts. ‘There is no reason why trial, acquittal or punishment cannot quickly follow crime under Civil, as well as Military rule’, they wrote. ‘Indeed it is obvious that officials understanding their duty must more readily and satisfactorily dispose of cases brought before them, than military officers, however able as Soldiers, who are suddenly called on to deal with novel and difficult questions’.29 Martial law, they continued, was also arbitrary, oppressive, and tended to exaggerate lesser crimes as more serious ones.30 They pointed to the fact that in Sindh, for example, no appeals whatsoever were allowed in civil cases, and that in criminal matters even the youngest and most inexperienced officers could inflict harsh punishments, requiring little or no proof to pass sentences: In a system where such was the process, justice, in many cases, was, no doubt, very expeditiously dispensed, but a good deal of injustice must have also been done. Too great a facility for appeal is doubtless an evil, but a complete sense of irresponsibility is a greater one. The fact that his proceedings can be revised, analysed and commented on, is a great check even on the best officer.31

Yet despite the Punjab Government’s critical stance towards the arbitrary and overly authoritarian nature of martial rule, the organisational structure and legal-political ethos of the new administration deeply resembled the sort of despotic military government advocated by Napier. In terms of its organisational framework, the Punjab administration was based on the system pioneered by Charles Metcalfe during his Residency in the Delhi territories in the 1810s.32 Metcalfe believed that the most effective and economical form of government for India administration has signally aided us in our conquests’: Memorandum on the Civil and Military Administration of the Punjab, 1 March 1850, BL, IOR, P/SEC/IND/165, no. 122, 26 April 1850, para. 16; also Dalhousie to Hobhouse, 11 May 1849, BL, IOR, Mss Eur F213/24, fp. 176. 28  Memorandum on the Civil and Military Administration of the Punjab, 1 March 1850, BL, IOR, P/SEC/IND/165, no. 122, 26 April 1850, para. 17. 29  Ibid., para. 68. 30  Ibid., para. 69. 31  Ibid., para. 70. 32  This system was also later exported to the North-Western Provinces under Robert Bird and James Thomason in the 1830s and 1840s.

110

Law, the Punjab School, and the ‘Kooka Outbreak’ of 1872

placed each district under the absolute control of a single officer imbued with combined revenue, policing, and judicial powers.33 Each district was then grouped into a larger division under the administrative oversight of a Commissioner, who, in turn, was ultimately responsible to a central board of control. As Eric Stokes points out, this was a fundamentally military structure of hierarchy and authority.34 Following its annexation, Punjab was divided into 27 districts, grouped together into seven larger divisions. Deputy Commissioners reported directly to the Commissioner in charge of their respective divisions, and ultimate authority resided with a Board of Administration consisting of John Lawrence, Charles Mansel, and Henry Lawrence as its president. Though initially intended to provide a final check against the decisions made by its subordinate officers, the Board quickly became the site of a number of hotly contested debates between the two Lawrence brothers and was eventually abolished in 1853.35 John Lawrence was subsequently appointed as the new Chief Commissioner of Punjab, granting him sole executive oversight over the entire province. The Punjab system also lacked a great deal of the much-vaunted judicial oversight that it claimed made it superior to the arbitrary and authoritarian nature of military law. In the case of criminal justice, officials were given wide-ranging powers and relatively weak supervision. Deputy Commissioners, for example, could issue prison sentences of up to three years with no review, and Commissioners were only required to obtain confirmation for their sentences if they involved capital punishment or transportation for life.36 Efficiency and expediency, rather than rigorous attention to procedure and fairness, were the hallmarks of the Punjab system. In March of 1851, for example, Commissioners were granted the power to decide sessions cases involving sentences of up to seven years based entirely on the record prepared by the local magistrate, without any recourse to witnesses or the concerned parties in the trial in order to ‘render the Administration of Justice more prompt’.37 Even magistrates were sometimes permitted to pass sentences without hearing any direct testimony. In these cases, evidence was taken down by Indian clerks ­sitting in different parts of the courtroom, and then ‘hastily  Stokes, The English Utilitarians, p. 153.  Ibid., p. 153. 35  Dalhousie to the PG, 31 March 1849, BL, IOR, H/760; also, Lee, Brothers in the Raj. 36  Dalhousie to the PG, 31 March 1849, BL, IOR, H/760, paras. 17, 20. 37   Circular from C.G. Mansel, 1 March 1851, Circular Orders Issued in the Judicial Department by the Board of Administration for the Affairs of the Punjab, from 8 May 1849 to 10 Feb 1853 (Lahore: Chronicle Press, 1853), BL, IOR, V/27/140/46, no. 5, p. 112; PAR 1849–50 & 1850–51, para. 185, p. 57. 33 34

The Militant Origins of the Punjab School111

read over to the presiding officer’ before a decision was made.38 Appeals were seen as a ‘frivolous’ waste of time, and the vast majority were often thrown out by the appellate court.39 As the Punjab Government boasted, ‘no effort has been spared to render justice cheap, quick, sure, simple and substantial . . . every other consideration has been rendered subordinate to these cardinal points’.40 Above all else, the administration of British justice in Punjab was meant to be swift, stern, and uncompromising. Officials believed that Punjabis respected only strength and power, and were unsuited to government based on abstract, complex, and impersonal mechanisms. As a fundamentally ‘backward’ and ‘tribal’ society, dominated by local strong men and chiefs, according to the British reading, they required a simpler, hands-on, ‘paternal’ form of rule.41 Officers were meant to live daily among their people, constantly touring their districts on horseback, all the while transacting their judicial and executive business with aplomb.42 As Robert Cust put it in his memoirs: The experience of half a century has given the stamp of approval to our strong but benevolent, rigorous but sympathetic system: ‘The iron hand in the velvet glove’: the rough-and-ready Justice: the words of sympathy and good-fellowship: the living alone amidst the people without soldiers or policemen: the Court held under the green mangoe-trees [sic] in the presence of hundreds: the right man hanged on the spot, where he committed the murder.43

In order to govern from a position of strength, these swaggering, swashbuckling officers were given much wider executive and discretionary authority when interpreting and enforcing the law. When he first laid out his vision for the administration of Punjab, Dalhousie famously insisted  Application for Increased Establishment for Disposing of the Judicial Work in the Punjab from the PG to the GOI, 23 August 1869, BL, IOR, P/442/52, no. 15, August 1869, para. 5, pp. 616–17. 39  Beames, Memoirs, p. 102. 40  PAR 1854–55 & 1855–56, para. 5, p. 5. 41  John Beames, Memoirs, p. 101; Talbot, The Punjab and the Raj, p. 34; David Gilmartin, ‘The Strange Career of the Rule of Law in Colonial Punjab’, Pakistan Vision, 10:2 (Lahore: University of the Punjab Pakistan Study Centre, 2009), p. 3. 42  According to John Beames, ‘Personal government was the only form of rule which the rude and simple Panjabis could understand, therefore the ideal Magistrate must show himself to all his people continually, must decide cases sitting on horseback in the village gateway, or under a tree outside the village walls, write his decision on his knee, while munching a native chapatty or a fowl cooked in a hole in the ground; and then mount his horse and be off to repeat the process in the next village’: Beames, Memoirs, pp. 102–3. This highly romanticised image became the cornerstone of Punjab governance, giving rise to what Stokes has referred to as the ‘cult of the district officer’: Stokes, The English Utilitarians, p. 154. 43  Robert Needham Cust, Memoirs of Past Years of a Septuagenarian (Hertford: Stephen Austin and Sons, 1899), p. 30. 38

112

Law, the Punjab School, and the ‘Kooka Outbreak’ of 1872

that he had ‘no wish that our voluminous laws should be introduced into this new country’.44 As a result, each district officer became ‘a little king within his own domain, subject to loosely defined limitations’.45 The discipline meted out by these mini-despots was harsh and uncompromising, and frequently involved flogging or caning. Many Punjab ­ officials believed that the ‘simple’ and ‘martial’ nature of Punjabis made them much more suited for the harshness of physical punishment, and some even claimed that many people preferred it to a fine or a term of imprisonment.46 ‘Our Civil system may appear rough and ready’, reassured the Punjab Government, and ‘whether it would be suited to other Provinces in a different stage of civilisation, and with a different machinery at command, may be a question. But in the Punjab, it attains the broad and plain object aimed at, and, without doubt, gives satisfaction to the people’.47 Although the Punjab Government claimed to reject the type of despotic military rule advocated by Napier, the system of governance that developed in the province was essentially the same. Returning to Napier’s point about the difference between civil and martial law – namely, that civil law was designed to reform moral behaviour gradually, while ­military law was meant to compel immediate and uncompromising obedience – the Punjab system obviously placed paramount emphasis on the latter. But despite its overtly belligerent and authoritarian tenor, the political rationality that underpinned this system was an essentially anxious and insecure one. Many of the arguments used to justify the despotic and draconian powers of Punjab administrators hinged on the idea that Punjabis, especially Sikhs, were warlike, turbulent, and particularly prone to revolt. In so doing, they also replicated many of the same tropes that Napier used to argue for military rule. In a letter to Napier from November of 1849, Dalhousie conceded that: ‘I would never for one moment abandon the vigilance I have enjoined upon all, or be unprepared for any aggression which may be made. To this extent I concur with you in thinking that we are always in danger, always on the edge of war or insurrection.’48 The newly established Punjab Government also

 Dalhousie to the PG, 31 March 1849, BL, IOR, H/760, paras. 12, 17.  Thorburn, The Punjab in Peace and War, p. 165. 46  ‘It was partly the frequency of appeals’, wrote John Beams, ‘and partly the suitability of physical punishment for a simple race that led to the frequent use of the cane. Many offences were punished by a flogging, and the people themselves preferred this summary disposal to the tedium of imprisonment or the long indebtedness resulting from a fine’: Beames, Memoirs, p. 102. 47  PAR 1854–55 & 1855–56, para. 5, p. 5. 48  Dalhousie to Hobhouse, 22 November 1849, BL, IOR, Mss Eur F213/24, fpp. 284–5. 44 45

Henry Maine and J.F. Stephen vs. the Punjab Government113

admitted that ‘the Punjab must always be held in strength, it can never be abandoned with safety’.49 Surrounded on all sides by potential enemies, officers were meant to project British power and prestige through expressions of pure power. In this light, the cult of the almighty district officer seems less the expression of a confident and powerful administration, than one desperate to uphold its own fragile power at all costs. 3.3

Henry Maine and J.F. Stephen vs. the Punjab Government

In May of 1887, a young Rudyard Kipling published an unsigned, twopart article in the Lahore Civil and Military Gazette entitled ‘In the Year ‘57’.50 Set in an Indian records office, the article tells the story of the narrator – presumably a stand-in for Kipling – as he sifts through a disorganised folder containing the correspondence produced by the Punjab Government and its administrators during the Indian Rebellion of 1857. As the narrator studies these files, he begins to imagine the great events of that terrible crisis, and is gradually transported from the ‘­affable, eloquent, impartial, educated Present’ to the ‘hard-pressed, brutal, and sternly Practical Past’. The archival disarray of the files becomes an expression of the chaos and disorder of the Rebellion itself, and the narrator’s struggle to bring some sort of chronological and thematic order to these documents mirrors the attempt by colonial authorities to restore order during the crisis. In spite of all this archival and historical disorder, the narrator is nonetheless able to find reassurance in the ‘rough and hard hand-writing’ of John Lawrence that courses throughout the files. Lawrence’s ‘rugged’ writing, which never fades and is ‘black and fresh as ever’, serves as a reminder of the indelible strength of colonial authority, and reassures that no matter what, order and justice will be restored: ‘above the clamour of command and counter-command, the bustle of alarums and excursions, through the smoke and the dust, runs a steel link of purpose and dominance – the will and the hand and the power of John Lawrence’. ‘In the end peace will come back’, Kipling concludes, ‘and then, and not till then, those lips will frame the question: – “Will you be governed by the Pen or by the Sword?”’51 Kipling’s article was written to mark the thirtieth anniversary of the Rebellion, but it was more than just a memorial to that event. It  was,  Memorandum on the Civil and Military Administration of the Punjab, 1 March 1850, BL, IOR, P/SEC/IND/165, no. 122, 26 April 1850, para. 16. 50  ‘In the Year ‘57’, Civil and Military Gazette, 14 and 23 May 1887, pp. 4; 4. 51  Ibid., 23 May 1887, p. 4. 49

114

Law, the Punjab School, and the ‘Kooka Outbreak’ of 1872

Figure 3.1  Sir John Lawrence, asViceroy of India (author’s own collection)

first and foremost, a celebration of the heroism of John Lawrence. The famous quotation about the pen and sword at the end of the article makes this abundantly clear, alluding to the inscription etched into the base of a statue of Lawrence that was erected in his honour in the Lahore Mall in the same year Kipling was writing.52 Cast in bronze, and standing at just over eight feet and six inches tall, the statue presented a commanding and heroic image of Lawrence, holding a sword in one hand and a pen in the other.53 With its forceful inscription and  As it turns out, this oft-quoted remark, which is so regularly attributed to Lawrence, was never actually uttered by him. Instead, it was derived from an anecdote involving Cust. Cust, however, made it perfectly clear that although the words may not have been spoken by Lawrence, they were certainly inspired by him: Cust, Memoirs, p. 97. See also Note by Sir A. Hirtzel, BL, IOR, L/PJ/6/1776, file 7098. 53  Note by Mr. Forster, 5 July 1923, BL, IOR, L/PJ/6/1776, file 7098. 52

Henry Maine and J.F. Stephen vs. the Punjab Government115

imposing bearing, the statue was an expression of and a tribute to the enduring strength of both Lawrence and the Punjab School he helped to pioneer. This rough and ready form of rule found many admirers and defenders in India, especially in the wake of the Rebellion, when it was hailed as the saviour of British India.54 Contemporary observers noted how Punjab’s unique form of authoritarian despotism imbued it with an efficiency unknown elsewhere in India, and celebrated its ability to take swift and decisive action. As one article in The Friend of India put it, ‘The Punjab, whether governed wisely or unwisely, is at least governed by an Administration which can move. It is at least free from the deadly torpor in which the whims of the Legislative Council bind the provinces given over to its ­control.’55 By the time Kipling wrote his tribute to the heroism of Lawrence and the Punjab system 30 years later, however, a great deal of this much-vaunted executive authority and vigour had seemingly been eroded by the gradual implementation, from the 1860s onwards, of more regularised and technocratic forms of rule due to the codification movement. Men like Kipling lamented the imposition of ‘machine rule’, and Punjab officers such as S.S. Thorburn even actively campaigned for the restoration of Punjab’s unique system of authoritarian despotism.56 The 1860s and early 1870s were a period when British legislators were systematically re-imagining the entire basis of Indian jurisprudence. Although the need for legal codification had initially been accepted under the Charter Act of 1833, and a law commission under T.B. Macaulay had even convened in 1834 to begin drafting legislation towards this end, codification in India made little headway until after the Rebellion. Between 1859 and 1872 successive law commissions enacted an array of sweeping legislation, including the Code of Civil Procedure (1859), the Indian Penal Code (1860), the Code of Criminal Procedure (1861), and the Evidence Act (1872). Codification significantly created the ­possibility for a new form of ‘scientific jurisprudence’ through the establishment of substantive legal codes.57 It also provided a renewed, and  ‘The Punjab in 1857–58’, The Friend of India, 25 (1859): pp. 51–2. John Lawrence, in particular, was singled out for praise, earning the moniker ‘the saviour of Punjab’, which, by extension, implied that he had saved the whole of India. 55  ‘The Civil Law in the Punjab’, ibid., pp. 338–9. 56  Andrew Hagiioannu, The Man Who Would be Kipling: The Colonial Fiction and the Frontiers of Exile (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp. 3–18. 57  India’s legal reform movement even outpaced similar reform efforts back in Britain. These reforms also took place within a wider global movement and engagement with the idea of legal codification which dated back to the adoption of the French Civil Code, or Code Napoléon, in 1804, and the Thibaut-Savigny debates in Prussia in 1814: Mantena, Alibis of Empire, pp. 91–2. Elizabeth Kolsky has also discussed the important global dimension of the debates surrounding codification: Elizabeth Kolsky, ‘Codification and 54

116

Law, the Punjab School, and the ‘Kooka Outbreak’ of 1872

much-needed, moral justification for British imperial rule following the Rebellion of 1857. This revamped legal project, officials reckoned, would finally ­liberate India from the tyranny of despotism, custom, and superstition by p ­ roviding it with standardised, rational legal codes.58 As Karuna Mantena puts it, by the end of the nineteenth century, ‘the rule of law had become . . . a de facto byword for the justification of British rule’, and was c­ onsidered to be the ‘supreme gift imparted by imperial rule’.59 In addition to its renewed and vigorous emphasis on the rule of law, one of the main goals of codification was to ensure that colonial authorities adhered to a uniform procedure when administering the law.60 As a result, the Punjab Government found itself under increasing pressure from lawmakers in India to adhere to a standardised set of legal codes, and to curb the extraordinary latitude granted to its officers when it came to interpreting and enforcing the law. Punjab officials, however, displayed a marked resistance to these ideals, and did everything within their power to retain the executive privileges and authority that were the cornerstone of their administration. As a result, Punjab became a battleground in debates about codification, and the principles intended to guide British colonial governance in India more broadly. Two men particularly influenced debates about codification and governance in regards to the situation in Punjab. One of the most outspoken and vocal critics of the Punjab system during this period was the highly influential jurist and sociologist, Henry Maine. During his seven-year stint as Law Member of the Governor-General’s Council between 1862 and 1869, Maine worked tirelessly both to help bring India under a unified code of procedural law, and to ensure that British administrators abided by these new laws. For Maine, Punjab’s ‘warlike’ government represented the worst example of the excesses of India’s peculiar legal-administrative framework.61 In his eyes, Punjab’s officers not only wielded an inordinate amount of personal power within their districts, but they also guarded that power jealously, unwilling to surrender any of it in order to submit to the rule of law. Maine’s close friend and successor, James Fitzjames Stephen, was another staunch proponent of codification. In addition to overseeing important reforms to the Punjab administration under Viceroy Lord Mayo (1869–72), Stephen was also the Law Member during the ‘Kooka outbreak’. Unlike Maine, however, Stephen actually found much to admire about the Punjab the Rule of Colonial Difference: Criminal Procedure in British India’, Law and History Review, 23:3 (2005): pp. 632–3.  den Otter, ‘“A Legislating Empire”’, p. 89. 59  Mantena, Alibis of Empire, pp. 90–1. 60  den Otter, ‘“A Legislating Empire”’. 61  Maine to Wood, 19 February 1864, BL, IOR, Mss Eur F78/114/2, fp. 42. 58

Henry Maine and J.F. Stephen vs. the Punjab Government117

system, and his attempts at legal reform in India were guided by the desire to preserve strong forms of executive authority and the ‘sovereign’ power to punish. The responses of both these important thinkers to Punjab’s recalcitrant, militant legal-administrative regime offer crucial insight into the shifting nature of colonial governance in India during this period, and the reasons why the handling of the ‘Kooka outbreak’ became such a bitterly contested imperial controversy. During his tenure as Law Member, Maine was often accused by critics of codification of ‘over-legislating’ and hampering the administrative efficiency and safety of the colonial regime. Maine, however, firmly believed that Indian administrators had ‘been too much used to do as they pleased’ when it came to the interpretation and application of the law.62 Though somewhat sceptical of the merits of codification, the Secretary of State for India, Charles Wood (1859–66), was inclined to agree with Maine that a ‘military mania’ had prevailed for too long in India, and that stronger checks were needed to guard against the excesses of unbridled executive authority.63 One of the most blatant examples of these excesses, according to Maine, was the Punjab administration’s unique concentration of revenue, policing, and judicial powers in the hands of individual officers. In a Minute from March of 1864, Maine called for a separation of these powers, and urged the Punjab administration to conform to the more procedural and institutionalised system of India’s regulation provinces. ‘There will be no real security for the prompt and accurate discharge of judicial duties’, he wrote, ‘until the special qualities and special knowledge required for those duties are recognized by appointing separate officers to perform them in all the higher grades’.64 While Maine was willing to concede that exceptional administrative and judicial arrangements were sometimes required in order to pacify newly-conquered, unsettled territories (as Punjab had been immediately following annexation in 1849), he warned that ‘unduly prolonging’ this could lead to grave injustices: The peculiar system of the Punjab, the accumulation of diverse functions, political, fiscal, administrative, and judicial, in the same hands, is, no doubt, excellently adapted for countries which are just settling down from the anarchy of Native Government; but it is most unjust to retain such a system after it has ceased to be necessary, and to sacrifice all other considerations to the transient need of concentrated authority.65  Ibid., fp. 41.  Wood to Maine, 24 March 1864, BL, IOR, Mss Eur/C179, fp. 79. 64   Minute by H.S. Maine, 26 March 1864, NAI, Foreign/Political A/May 1865/nos. 98–123, no. 109, p. 2. 65  Ibid. 62 63

118

Law, the Punjab School, and the ‘Kooka Outbreak’ of 1872

The Punjab Government’s stubborn resistance to adhering to India’s new judicial codes was an especially contentious issue for Maine. In January of 1864, Maine admonished the Punjab Government for its attempts to obtain an exemption from the Indian Penal Code and the Code of Criminal Procedure in its administration of the Spiti Valley and other areas deemed too ‘backward’ for regular law and administration.66 Maine insisted that it did not matter what type of law a people – ‘either civilized or savage’ – lived under, and that these types of arguments were based less on the actual existence of truly exceptional circumstances, than the Punjab Government’s simple unwillingness to adhere to any sort of law at all. ‘I think it might be as well to remind the Punjab Government’, Maine wrote, ‘that the difficulty does not arise from anything in the people, but from the want of agency sufficient to carry out even one of the simplest of written laws’.67 Similar and repeated attempts by Punjab officials to insist upon the unique exigencies of Punjab governance by referring to the unique problems of governance encountered by officers situated in the trans-Indus territories along the NWF were also dismissed by Maine. In his opinion, such attempts were simply an attempt to lump together the exceptionalism of the frontier with the rest of Punjab, so as to make the entire province appear ‘much more backward than it really is’.68 For Maine, then, though the extraordinary powers of Punjab officers had initially been quite justified in order to contend with the exigencies of pacification following annexation, the exceptional circumstances of that time had long since passed, and the Punjab Government was now merely clinging to a fantasy of emergency where none really existed. Maine’s ongoing battle with the Punjab Government provides one particularly striking example of the tension between the imposition of   According to the Punjab Government, while such ‘elaborate and comprehensive ­enactments’ were appropriate for sufficiently ‘advanced’ societies, in Spiti and other ‘backward’ areas, they represented nothing but ‘superfluous and bewildering abstractions’. In their opinion, before ‘civilised’ law could be brought to such areas, they first needed to be thoroughly subjected by a more rough and ready form of administration: ‘throughout India there must be many tracts into which rules and forms as simple as possible are all that can, for many years to come, be profitably introduced, and that it will more conduce to the ultimate subjection of primitive populations to sound legislation to accustom them to temporary regulations adapted to their backward circumstances’: PG to the GOI, 9 January 1864, BL, IOR, P/204/71, no. 287, paras. 7–8, pp. 502–3. 67  Minute by Henry Maine, 28 January 1864, in Minutes by Sir H.S. Maine, 1862–69: with a Note on Indian Codification (Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, India, 1892), BL, IOR, V/3130, p. 26. 68   Minute by H.S. Maine, 26 March 1864, NAI, Foreign/Political A/May 1865/nos. 98–123, no. 109, p. 2. 66

Henry Maine and J.F. Stephen vs. the Punjab Government119

a universal rule of law and the concurrent desire among certain Indian officials to maintain an illimitable form of executive authority. However, where Maine was deeply critical of the Punjab system, his successor as Law Member, James Fitzjames Stephen (1869–72), was much more sympathetic to those critics of codification who argued that strong executive authority needed to be preserved in India.69 Like Maine, Stephen believed that the great advantage of the rule of law lay in its universalising potential to ensure that justice could be applied uniformly and equally across India. For Stephen, however, the purpose of a universal rule of law was not to eliminate powerful executive authority in India, but to regulate it so that it was more uniform, standardised, and less vulnerable to the ‘whims’ and idiosyncrasies of individuals.70 In his view, this was the fundamental difference between Indian and British forms of governance. Unlike the unrestrained despotism of Indian rulers, British rule was governed by the rule of law, which acted as a check against ‘arbitrary and irresponsible power’.71 Stephen, therefore, set out to demonstrate to the critics of codification how British authority could be at once rooted in law, but still confer extraordinary discretionary powers of authority to its officers. In his seminal 1872 Minute on the Administration of Justice in British India,72 Stephen noted how, ‘Nothing has struck me more forcibly in India, than the almost inveterate prejudice in the minds of many district officers that law . . . is a sort of mysterious enemy to them which . . . will prevent all vigorous executive action’.73 As he summed up several years later, ‘many persons object not so much to any particular laws, as to the government of the country by law at all’.74 In Stephen’s view, ­however,

 den Otter, ‘“A Legislating Empire”’, p. 107.  J. Fitzjames Stephen, ‘Legislation under Lord Mayo’, in W.W. Hunter, A Life of the Earl of Mayo, Fourth Viceroy of India (London: Smith, Elder, & Co., 1875), p. 188. 71  ‘Before the establishment of British power in India’, wrote Stephen, ‘the administration of justice was almost entirely a personal matter’: James Fitzjames Stephen, Minute on the Administration of Justice in British India (Calcutta: Home Secretariat Press, 1872), BL, IOR, V/23/28, fiche no. 201B206, index 150, p. 93. See also Stephen, ‘Legislation under Lord Mayo’, pp. 156–61. 72  This important and highly influential Minute was originally written in September of 1870, was later revised during the summer of 1871, and was finally published in April of 1872 after additional alterations. To view the 1870 draft version, see BL, IOR, L/PJ/5/437. 73  Stephen, Minute on the Administration of Justice, p. 85. 74  Stephen, ‘Legislation under Lord Mayo’, p. 152. As he elucidated further, ‘The theory that government by law is not suitable for India, and that everything ought to be left to the personal discretion of the rulers, that is to say, of the District Officers, is one of those theories which many persons hold, though no one who regards his own reputation will avow it’: ibid., p. 160. 69 70

120

Law, the Punjab School, and the ‘Kooka Outbreak’ of 1872

Figure 3.2  Sir James Fitzjames Stephen Portrait by Lock and Whitfield, 1882. © National Portrait Gallery, London

codified laws and procedure could actually enhance ‘executive vigour’ by providing clearly delineated courses of action open to officials.75 Interestingly enough, it was the early Punjab system which Stephen believed provided the best example of how executive authority could be at once vigorous and efficient, but still subject to the rule of law. In his view, the difference between the non-regulation and regulation provinces was not that the former were governed without any laws whatsoever, but rather that they were governed by simpler, better laws. ‘A Non-Regulation Province’, he wrote, ‘was in fact, a Province governed by sensible laws instead of clumsy ones’.76 Punjab, in particular, he argued, actually provided the first example of a government which operated under codified  ‘I was once discussing with a military officer of high rank, and in high civil employ the provisions of a bill for putting certain criminal tribes in the North-West Provinces under police supervision’, Stephen wrote. ‘When I showed him the powers which it conferred upon executive officers, he said, “It is quite a new idea to me that the law can be anything but a check to the executive power”’: ibid., p. 155. 76  Stephen, ‘Legislation under Lord Mayo’, p. 168. 75

Henry Maine and J.F. Stephen vs. the Punjab Government121

law anywhere in British India.77  The Punjab system, therefore, allowed for ‘almost unlimited discretionary power’, but one which was firmly rooted in the rule of law: To unite by law all authority in one hand, to give by law wide individual discretion to the person in whose hands all authority is so united, to make the laws so administered as few, as plain, and as simple as possible are, no doubt, good principles for the administration of a wild province; but all this is government by good law as opposed to government without law on the one side, and government by bad law on the other.78

By the time Stephen became Law Member, the Punjab system was seen by many to be in a state of decay. In 1866, Punjab had officially become a regulation province, making it subject – at least in theory – to all the same procedural codes and regulations as the rest of India. Nevertheless, many of its non-regulation practices also persisted, including the concentration of executive and judicial functions in the hands of individual officers. Although codification was championed in some circles, it was viewed with suspicion and trepidation in others. Many of India’s administrators in the 1860s and 1870s were quite wary of any form of substantive, institutionalised law, and were reluctant to openly embrace what promised to be a profound shift in the way India was governed. As Sandra den Otter has pointed out, these administrators believed that the extension of the rule of law was inimical to vigorous government, since it not only regulated the conduct of its colonial subjects, but also placed limits on the executive authority of colonial officials.79 This was an especially difficult idea to sell in the wake of the nearly catastrophic Rebellion of 1857, when it was widely believed that unrestrained despotism was the best form of rule for India.80 This was certainly the case with the Punjab administration. According to an 1871 compilation of early Punjab law by D.G. Barkley: ‘There are . . . many indications that for a long series of years the notion was generally current that no enactments, whenever passed into law, or however general in their terms, were applicable to the Punjab, except so far as it was found convenient in practice to act upon them’.81 Viceroy John Lawrence (1864–9) was certainly sympathetic to the opponents of codification. As one of the architects of the Punjab School, Lawrence was one of the strongest advocates of the

 Ibid., p. 179.  Stephen, Minute on the Administration of Justice, p. 7.  den Otter, ‘“A Legislating Empire”’, p. 107. 80  Mantena, Alibis of Empire, p. 97. 81  D.G. Barkley, The Non-Regulation Law of the Punjab (Lahore: Punjab Printing Company, 1871), BL, IOR, V/5507, p. iii. 77 78 79

122

Law, the Punjab School, and the ‘Kooka Outbreak’ of 1872

need for ‘patriarchal’, authoritarian governance which was not weighed down by regulations or excessive interference from superiors.82 If the Rebellion had taught colonial officials one lesson, it was that colonial justice needed to be swift, severe, and exemplary if they were going to be able to keep their subjects in check and prevent a similar catastrophe from occurring again. Punjab consequently continued to resist and subvert the new legal codes at almost every turn.83 By 1869, however, it was becoming ­increasingly evident that Punjab officers could no longer effectively discharge their combined executive and judicial duties. The Punjab Government found itself swamped by petitions and complaints from its officers about how the newly-imposed legal codes interfered with their duties. Officers complained how judicial work performed under the new Codes of Civil and Criminal Procedure had become excessively tedious and protracted now that evidence needed to be ‘carefully drawn’, and that ‘regular trials’ had to be held. Worse still, the increased oversight of the judges of the Chief Court, ‘who exact more strict attention to procedure, and greater care in the disposal of judicial business, than was the case in the days of the Judicial Commissioner’, meant that the much-vaunted discretionary authority of these officers had declined.84 The evident inability of the Punjab system to continue to operate effectively convinced Viceroy Mayo in late December of 1870 that drastic reforms were required. Mayo’s justifications for reform were guided, in large part, by the same arguments that had been made by Maine in 1864. Mayo concurred with Maine that the exigencies of pacifying a turbulent and backward country which had confronted Punjab administrators immediately after annexation, and had necessitated Punjab’s uniquely authoritarian system, no longer applied. Punjab had since become ‘­settled’ and ‘orderly’, and was now fit for a regular system of government in which executive and judicial authority were separated:

  Gordon Johnson, ‘India and Henry Maine’, in Alan Diamond (ed.), The Victorian Achievement of Sir Henry Maine: A Centennial Reappraisal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 378. 83  See Minute by Henry Maine, 6 July 1866; Minute, 9 July 1866, in Minutes by Sir H.S. Maine, pp. 85–9. 84  The Punjab Government summed up the crux of the problem in a letter to the Home Department in August of 1869: ‘In the earlier days of the administration, when executive business was not so heavy as at present, civil suits far less numerous, procedure less elaborate . . . the judicial business did not usurp much of the time or the energies of the officers of the Administration; but during the last few years, there has been at once a great increase of executive business, an enormous influx of litigation, and a great elaboration of the judicial system’: Application for Increased Establishment for Disposing of the Judicial Work, 23 August 1869, BL, IOR, P/442/52, no. 15, August 1869, pp. 616–17. 82

Henry Maine and J.F. Stephen vs. the Punjab Government123 the principle of concentrating in the same hands all authority, judicial and executive, in each district . . . has, no doubt, great advantages when the object in view is to introduce a settled form of government into a Province in the condition of anarchy or misrule which prevailed in the Panjab when it was annexed. . . The Governor-General in Council is, however, of the opinion that when the object which originally led to the introduction of a system founded upon such a principle has been attained, the principle itself ceases to apply. The concentration of all powers in one hand may be an effective instrument for reducing a disorderly Province to order, but it is not equally well adapted for the government of a Province which has become orderly. It has indeed, a direct tendency to defeat its own object.85

Stephen’s Minute – which was originally written in September of 1870, several months before Mayo’s call for reform – directly addressed the growing problems that were associated with the continuation of the non-regulation system in India. Stephen concurred with the Punjab Government’s position that the new judicial procedures introduced by India’s legal codes had severely hampered the ability of officials in the non-regulation provinces to effectively carry out their combined judicial and executive duties. In his view, the advantages of despotic power – namely, its ‘unity’ and ‘simplicity’ – were negated as soon as a despot was placed under restrictions of any sort, which the introduction of codified laws had done. As a result, Punjab’s once-mighty, ‘despotic’ administrator had now become nothing more than an ‘over-worked official ­burdened with a number of heterogeneous functions’.86 For Stephen, the obvious solution was not to increase the number of judicial officers, as the Punjab Government had recommended, but to separate their executive and judicial functions altogether.87 This measure was to be enacted across all of India’s non-regulation provinces – Assam, Burma, the Central Provinces, and, of course, Punjab – and would have effectively ended non-­regulation governance in India, but for one critical modification: instead of separating executive and judicial duties entirely, Stephen insisted that civil judicial business should be separated, and that district officers should maintain their joint executive and criminal judicial work. Stephen’s insistence that criminal and executive functions remain in the hands of Punjab’s district officers was based, in large part, on the need to maintain British prestige as India’s ‘ruling race’. ‘We must have all over the country real and effective governors’, he argued, ‘and no application of the principle of the division of labour ought, in my opinion,  GOI to the PG, 23 December 1870, BL, IOR, P/147, no. 7, January 1871, para. 2, pp. 19–20. 86  Stephen, Minute on the Administration of Justice, p. 8. 87  Ibid., p. 6. 85

124

Law, the Punjab School, and the ‘Kooka Outbreak’ of 1872

to be even taken into consideration which would not leave in the hands of district officers such an amount of power as will lead the people at large to regard them as, in a general sense, their rulers and governors’.88 Above all else, Stephen stressed how it was critical that district officers maintain their sovereign ability to punish their subjects: The exercise of criminal jurisdiction is both, in theory and in fact, the most ­distinctive and most easily and generally recognized mark of sovereign power. All the world over the man who can punish is the ruler. Put this prerogative ­exclusively in the hands of a purely judicial officer who has no other relations at all to the people, and who passes his whole life in a Court, and I can well believe that the result would be to break down in their minds the very notion of any sort of personal rule or authority on the part of the Magistrates.89

Stephen’s belief that the British needed to be able to retain their power to punish was informed by his belief that the British needed to be ‘hands-on’ rulers. ‘I shall not be suspected of undervaluing my own profession’, he wrote in 1870, ‘but I must say I can hardly imagine a greater calamity for British India than the undue preponderance of the legal over the executive element’.90 3.4

Panic, Exemplary Punishment, and the ‘Kooka Outbreak’ of 1872

On 8 February 1872, Viceroy Mayo was assassinated by a Pashtun ‘fanatic’91 by the name of Sher Ali Afridi during a trip to the Andaman Islands. Mayo’s body was returned to Calcutta on 19 February, and was given an elaborate state funeral that exemplified all the pomp and grandeur of colonial spectacle. Troops lined the road as far as the eye could see, gun salutes were fired from Fort William, ships gathered in the Hooghly River, and Mayo’s coffin was carried atop a large gun-carriage drawn by 12 artillery horses. Above all else, then, this was a profoundly military spectacle. Yet, for all its outward display of power and might, Mayo’s funeral procession could not conceal the deep sense of colonial

 ‘The maintenance of the position of the district officers is absolutely essential to the maintenance of British Rule in India’, he wrote, ‘and that any diminution in their influence and authority over the Natives would be dearly purchased even by an improvement in the administration of justice without their own limits, and as regards the population of their own district, the district officers are the Government, and they ought, I think, to continue to be so’: ibid., p. 26. 89  Ibid. 90  Stephen, ‘Minute on the Administration of Justice’, 13 September 1870, BL, IOR, L/PJ/5/437, p. 14. 91  Chapter 4 will explore the issue of ‘fanaticism’ in greater length. 88

Panic, Exemplary Punishment, and 1872 ‘Kooka Outbreak’

125

Figure 3.3  The Assassination of Lord Mayo Illustration from James Grant, Cassell’s Illustrated History of India (London: Cassell, Petter & Galphin, 1880), vol. 2 (author’s own collection)

v­ ulnerability that underpinned it. Writing to his mother on 23 February 1872, Stephen described the deep impression this event made on him, noting how the presence of so many troops made it seem like ‘marching through a city half-dead and half-besieged’. ‘Troops and cannon and gun-carriages seem out of place in England’, he continued, ‘but it is a very different matter here, where everything rests upon military force. The guns and troops are not only the outward and visible marks of power, but they are the power itself to a great extent and it is very impressive to see them’.92 Stephen’s comments are hardly surprising considering his firm belief that British rule in India ultimately represented a ‘belligerent’ ­civilisation and his acknowledgment of the crucial role that military power played in upholding that power.93 What is much more remarkable is that Stephen wrote this just shortly after the brutal ­suppression of the ‘Kooka o ­ utbreak’, which gave literal meaning to his comments about guns and soldiers being the mark of British authority. The ­controversy

 Leslie Stephen, The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen (London: Smith, Elder, & Co., 1895), p. 295. 93  See James Fitzjames Stephen, ‘Foundations of the Government of India’, Nineteenth Century, 14:80 (October, 1883), pp. 541–68. 92

126

Law, the Punjab School, and the ‘Kooka Outbreak’ of 1872

generated by this event not only provides another ­example of the fault lines running beneath the construction of British authority in India, but is also deeply revealing about the ‘anxious’ vulnerability that underpinned colonial power in Punjab. On the night of 14 January 1872, a group of around 125 Namdhari Sikhs launched a sudden attack against the Malodh fort, situated about 20 miles south of Ludhiana. After being driven back, the Namdharis then proceeded to the nearby Muslim princely state of Malerkotla on the following morning, where they attempted to storm the palace and treasury. During the ensuing fighting, the Namdharis managed to kill and injure several of the guards and townspeople, but not without suffering heavy casualties themselves. Once again forced to retreat, the Namdharis were pursued to a nearby village where they eventually surrendered and were taken prisoner by a small contingent of troopers from the Sikh princely state of Patiala.94 Although the assaults on both Malodh and Malerkotla were poorly orchestrated and promptly repulsed, news of the attacks sent a wave of panic through the local British administration.95 Initial reports greatly exaggerated the size of the Namdhari force (one estimate put it at nearly 500 strong), and other reports from Lahore claimed that ‘thousands’ of additional Namdharis were gathering in neighbouring villages and preparing to launch further attacks.96 Upon hearing news of the second attack, Cowan immediately telegraphed for British reinforcements, and then rushed to Malerkotla to render assistance. By the time he arrived on the scene, Cowan found that the Namdharis involved in the attack had already been apprehended, and that many of them were poorly armed, hungry, and had been badly injured.97 Despite their wretched condition and his own admission that the entire gang had been ‘nearly destroyed’, Cowan summarily executed 49 prisoners the following day by tying them to the mouths of artillery guns and blowing them away.98 The Sikhs responsible for the ‘Kooka outbreak’ belonged to a radical reform movement founded by Bhai Balak Singh (1799–1862) that combined aspects of millenarianism, a zealous devotion to preserving the purity and holiness of Sikh traditions, and the denunciation of what were  PG to the GOI, 16 January 1872, Kooka Outbreak, p. 7; Forsyth to the PG, 17 January 1872, ibid., p. 11; Cowan to Forsyth, 17 January 1872, ibid., p. 14. 95  PG to the GOI, 16 January 1872, ibid., p. 7; Forsyth to the PG, 17 January 1872, ibid., p. 11. 96  PG to the GOI, 16 January 1872, ibid., p. 7. 97  Cowan to Forsyth, 17 January 1872, ibid., p. 15; Forsyth to the PG, 17 January 1872, ibid., pp. 10–11. 98  Cowan to Forsyth, 16 January 1872, ibid., p. 11. 94

Panic, Exemplary Punishment, and 1872 ‘Kooka Outbreak’

127

seen as the corrupt practices of high-caste Sikhs. The term ‘Namdhari’ derives from the fact that followers were meant to repeatedly chant the name (nam) of God.99 By the late 1860s, the Namdharis had attracted a fairly significant following throughout certain parts of Punjab, and their methods had earned them notoriety among colonial officials for militancy, particularly their demolition and desecration of village shrines.100 What officials found even more troubling was that the Namdharis were also one of the most vocal and aggressive groups in the fiercely divisive cow slaughter issue that pitted India’s Hindu and Muslim communities against each other in the late nineteenth century. In 1871, incited by the preachings of Ram Singh, Balak Singh’s successor, Namdharis murdered Muslim butchers in Amritsar and Ludhiana for killing cows, and the attack against the Muslim princely state of Malerkotla seems to have been similarly motivated.101 On 16 January, the night before the executions, Cowan wrote to his superior, T.D. Forsyth, the Commissioner of Ambala, informing of his intention to dispatch his Namdhari prisoners by cannonading. Although Cowan acknowledged that his proposal to execute the prisoners in this manner was technically illegal, he argued that this was an exceptional case that required an extraordinary and exemplary response: Their offence is not an ordinary one. They have not committed mere murder and dacoity; they are open rebels, offering contumacious resistance to constituted authority, and, to prevent the spreading of the disease, it is absolutely necessary that repressive measures should be prompt and stern. I am sensible of the great responsibility I incur; but I am satisfied that I act for the best, and that this incipient insurrection must be stamped out at once.102

Forsyth, who was already en route to Malerkotla, replied the following day, congratulating Cowan on his speedy handling of the situation, but instructed him to hold off from illegally executing the prisoners. Because the crimes had been committed in the semi-independent jurisdiction of Malerkotla, Forsyth pointed out that he had the authority to sanction capital sentences without the usual confirmation required from the Punjab Chief Court, and would gladly do so once Cowan had drawn up formal proceedings against the Namdharis. As he put it, ‘the case is not  Rajiv A. Kapur, Sikh Separatism: The Politics of Faith (London: Allen & Unwin, 1986), p. 16. 100   Harjot Oberoi, ‘Brotherhood of the Pure: The Poetics and Politics of Cultural Transgression’, Modern Asian Studies, 26:1 (1992): p. 172. 101  Kapur, Sikh Separatism, pp. 36–7; Oberoi, ‘Brotherhood of the Pure’, pp. 173, 83; also PG to the GOI, 19 January 1872, Kooka Outbreak, p. 10; PG to the GOI, 7 February 1872, ibid., p. 27. 102  Cowan to Forsyth, 6 January 1872, ibid., p. 11. 99

128

Law, the Punjab School, and the ‘Kooka Outbreak’ of 1872

sufficiently urgent to justify the abandonment of the very simple form of procedure we have at hand’.103 By the time Cowan received Forsyth’s letter, however, it was already too late. During the afternoon of 17 January, 49 of the rebels were blown to pieces on the parade ground at Malerkotla in the presence of the local ruler, as well as troops from the nearby princely states of Patiala, Nabha, and Jind. Forsyth’s letter from that morning did not reach Cowan until the last batch of prisoners had already been tied to the guns, placing him in a rather awkward position. Believing he could not afford to show any sign of hesitation lest it be interpreted as weakness, Cowan continued with the executions against Forsyth’s orders.104 ‘In carrying out execution of my own sentence’, he later wrote, ‘I acted on the honest and sincere conviction that I was acting in the best interests of Government. A rebellion, which might have attained large dimensions, was nipped in the bud, and a terrible and prompt punishment was in my opinion absolutely necessary to prevent the recurrence of similar rising’.105 Cowan added that the executions had ‘a most happy effect’ in impressing on the local people the sheer power and authority of the British government. When Forsyth arrived the following morning and discovered what had transpired, he was placed in an equally difficult position. Sixteen prisoners still remained to be executed, and, like Cowan, Forsyth feared that British prestige might be damaged if he were seen to reverse course. As a result, after conducting hastily-prepared trials for each of the prisoners, Forsyth had the remaining 16 Namdharis blown from the guns.106 When news of the executions reached the Punjab Government and GOI, the reaction was mixed. In their initial telegram to the GOI on 19 January reporting on the executions, the Punjab Government claimed that ‘Cowan’s prompt action deserves praise’.107 A longer letter from that same day, however, was not so unequivocally supportive of Cowan’s actions. This time, the Lieutenant-Governor of Punjab, Robert Davies, expressed ‘regret’ at the ‘undue haste’ displayed by Cowan, but nevertheless maintained that it was natural that officers should become ‘excited’ in situations such as this, and that allowance should perhaps be made for the exceptional circumstances in which Cowan had found himself.108 Writing to the Punjab Government on 20 January, Forsyth  Forsyth to Cowan, 17 January 1872, ibid., p. 11; also Forsyth to the PG, 19 January 1872, ibid., p. 18. 104  Cowan to the PG, 8 April 1872, ibid., p. 53. 105  Cowan to Forsyth, 17 January 1872, ibid., p. 16. 106  Forsyth to the PG, 19 January 1872, ibid., pp. 18–19. 107  Telegram from the PG to the GOI, 19 January 1872, ibid., p. 6. 108  PG to the GOI, 19 January 1872, ibid., pp. 9–10. 103

Panic, Exemplary Punishment, and 1872 ‘Kooka Outbreak’

129

also conceded that Cowan’s actions had been improper, but he urged his superiors to make allowances for the exceptional circumstances in which he had found himself. ‘I regret exceedingly’, wrote Forsyth, ‘that his summary executions without trial should detract from the good service he has rendered, but I trust that the circumstances in which he was placed may be taken into consideration’.109 In a subsequent letter, Davies also pointed out that while Cowan could have ‘shown more coolness and discretion’, the fact that the executions took place in the semi-independent jurisdiction of a princely state meant ‘it may be held that he did not exceed the authority vested in him as the ex-officio Political Agent for the Malair Kotlah State’.110 But while Cowan may have enjoyed the tentative approval of the Punjab authorities, the central government in Calcutta strongly condemned his actions, and on 24 January (the same day Mayo departed for the Andaman Islands) they ordered that he be suspended pending a full inquiry into his conduct.111 ‘I cannot tell you how much I lament this occurrence’, Mayo wrote in a private letter to George Campbell, the Secretary of State for India. ‘They must weaken authority and bring disgrace on our Govt. I am quite ashamed of the way many of my Countrymen talk of the deed. They call Cowan a fine vigorous fellow and trust that he will be supported, but I cannot help that. The act was one of great and unnecessary cruelty and I must condemn it’.112 In response, Davies came more forcefully to Cowan’s defence. Emphasizing that while Cowan’s actions were technically improper, Davies insisted that Cowan ‘did no injustice’ and that ‘it was essential to the maintenance of public authority that a striking example should be made’. Moreover, Davies feared that censuring Cowan would set a dangerous precedent that would discourage other officers from acting decisively in future crises or emergencies: The Lieutenant Governor does not underrate the necessity for holding officers in the exercise of public authority strictly responsible that the forms and procedure prescribed for their guidance are exactly observed. . . But, on the other hand, these very occurrences exemplify the difficult position officers may be placed in, and the dilemma to which minds not, perhaps, exceptionally strong, and necessarily much disturbed and excited, may be exposed. And the Lieutenant Governor cannot blind himself to the consequences of the growth of a belief that the only course that can be followed with personal safety is the cautious adherence to technical forms, and the studied evasion of individual responsibility. Where, therefore, as in the present case, his Honor sees no cause to doubt but that the proceedings, however,  Forsyth to the PG, 20 January 1872, ibid., p. 20.  PG to the GOI, 26 January 1872, ibid., p. 21. 111  GOI to the PG, 24 January 1872, ibid., p. 17. 112  Mayo to Argyll, 24 January 1872, BL, IOR, Neg 4236/1. 109 110

130

Law, the Punjab School, and the ‘Kooka Outbreak’ of 1872

in his opinion, hasty and irregular, were taken in good faith as necessary to the public safety, and however indiscriminate, impolitic, and unduly severe, involved, nevertheless, no absolute injustice, the Lieutenant Governor holds that he chooses the lesser public evil in not withholding his support to irrevocable acts.113

Davies’ reply thus repeated many of the older arguments about the need to preserve some measure of the much-vaunted executive discretion and privilege that had long been the hallmark of the Punjab system. According to this logic, the only way that administrators could maintain order when threatened with a crisis was through prompt and decisive executive action. Any further encroachments upon this principle would carry serious risks for the continued security of British rule.114 Back within the Viceroy’s Executive Council, the inquiry into Cowan and Forsyth’s conduct became a hotly debated issue. Although there was a unanimous consensus that both officers had acted improperly – and, in Cowan’s case, illegally – the Council was much less certain about what should be done with the officers.115 Some members took a hard line, arguing that there would be dire consequences if the government allowed its officers to do as they pleased with impunity. As John Strachey put it, ‘the inevitable result would be to make our Commissioner and District Officers suppose that, when political danger threatens, they may safely act upon their own impulses, and that the Government will support whatever action they may take, however violent and illegal it may be’.116 Others, however, were much more sympathetic towards Cowan and Forsyth. According to Richard Temple, although both officers had acted ‘erroneously’, they had done so in trying circumstances ‘calculated to excite their minds’, and had genuinely believed they were ‘acting in the public interest’.117 Indeed, as ‘inhumane’ as Cowan’s actions may have been, most within the Council were forced to concede that they had most likely prevented a more serious uprising. There was also the more delicate political issue of how any rebuke against Cowan and Forsyth would be interpreted by the princely states of Patiala, Nabha, and Jind, all of whom strongly supported the executions and praised Cowan for saving the day.118  PG to the GOI, 7 February 1872, Kooka Outbreak, p. 28.  Minute by the Lieutenant-Governor of Punjab, 26 February 1872, NAI, Home/Judicial A/June 1872, nos. 107–11. 115  Acting Governor-General Lord Francis Napier seems to have been particularly torn on this issue, and prevaricated between dismissing, demoting, or simply reprimanding Cowan and Forsyth. After initially advocating for Cowan’s outright dismissal, Napier later considered that a transfer and suspension would be sufficient punishment, before finally deciding on his original course of action: Note by N., 8 March 1872, ibid.; ibid., 4 April 1872; ibid., 16 April 1872, NAI, Home/Judicial A/June 1872/nos. 112–32. 116  Note by J.S., 16 March 1872, ibid. 117  Note by R.T., 3 April 1872, ibid. 118  Note by N., 4 April 1872, ibid. 113 114

Panic, Exemplary Punishment, and 1872 ‘Kooka Outbreak’

131

On 30 April 1872, Acting Governor-General Lord Francis Napier issued his final decision on the case. Despite having ‘acted with promptitude’ in the repression of a revolt, Cowan was removed from his position (though not without securing a small pension of Rs. 300 per month).119 For failing to demonstrate ‘that merciful discrimination which ought in all cases to be characteristic of the British administration of justice’, and for having ‘identified himself with the errors committed by Mr. Cowan’ in sanctioning the 16 additional executions of 18 January, Forsyth was transferred to Awadh.120 In addition to settling the fate of these two officers, Napier’s decision also offered a strong rebuke to the entire Punjab system, which bore the unmistakable imprint of Stephen and the ideas and arguments he put forth in his 1872 Minute.121 As Napier saw it, Cowan’s actions were not isolated, but sprang from a widespread and deeply problematic belief in British India, particularly in Punjab, that laws could be discarded whenever they were found to be inconvenient or when any sort of emergency or crisis threatened to arise. ‘This principle’, they wrote, ‘is that law is meant only for quiet times, and that officers are justified in disregarding it, as soon as political danger is apprehended, and in substituting punishments inflicted at their own discretion . . . formed on the spot under the pressure of immediate excitement’.122 Napier emphatically reminded the Punjab Government that law administered by established courts was the primary ‘instrument’ to which the GOI looked for suppressing crime and securing the country, and that for its officers to do otherwise would be a usurpation of ‘the highest prerogative of the Government’.123 Cowan’s actions, Napier ­concluded, were thus entirely unjustifiable, and ultimately ‘repugnant to the whole spirit of British rule’.

 GOI to Argyll, 3 May 1872, Kooka Outbreak, pp. 59–60; Argyll to the GOI, 18 July 1872, ibid., p. 60; also NAI, Home/Judicial A/August 1872/no. 246. 120  GOI to the PG, 30 April 1872, Kooka Outbreak, pp. 57–8. 121  It is perhaps no coincidence that the final version of Stephen’s Minute was published that same month. 122  GOI to the PG, 30 April 1872, Kooka Outbreak, p. 55. 123  It is worth quoting the passage at length: ‘His Excellency in Council desires to impress, in the most emphatic manner, on all civil and military officers whom it may concern, the broad principle that the law of the land administered by the established courts is the instrument to which Government looks, and in which it trusts, for the purpose of suppressing crime, maintaining peace, and deterring ill-disposed persons from following the example of malefactors; and that it is a grave act of insubordination and presumption for any individual officer to take upon himself to decide upon the spur of the moment that the law is not strong enough to protect society, or that the punishments which can be inflicted in its ordinary course are not sufficiently severe to deter from crime. To do so is to usurp the highest prerogative of the Government. Cases may arise in which Government may consider it necessary to punish particular offences with exceptional severity, or to arm particular officers with special powers of summary trial and execution; but till this is done, the duty of all civil and military officers in all cases is 119

132

Law, the Punjab School, and the ‘Kooka Outbreak’ of 1872

Outside official circles, the executions at Malerkotla and the government’s subsequent handling of the affair sparked a heated discussion within both the Indian and metropolitan British press. This debate drew in key political figures, including several former Punjab officials, and cut to the heart of the principles that were meant to guide colonial governance in Punjab and India. Initially, Cowan was widely praised for his ‘prompt and energetic action’ in averting what many, including the former Commissioner of Ambala, Reynell Taylor, believed could have become a second ‘Mutiny’.124 If more British officers in 1857 had shown the same sort of ‘vigour’ as Cowan, another writer argued, the British would have been spared ‘the horrors of the massacre at Cawnpore’.125 T.H. Thornton, the Secretary to the Punjab Government, even forwarded a letter to the Times from the Maharajah of Patiala stating that ‘had not the men been captured and dealt with at once as they have been, the consequences would have been disastrous’.126 However, as more details of the case emerged, public opinion gradually turned against both Cowan and Forsyth. Although most people still firmly believed that the executions of mutinous sepoys during the Rebellion of 1857 had been a ‘necessary’ and justifiable expedient, the public became increasingly convinced that the threat posed by the Namdharis had been completely overblown. As the Bombay Gazette put it: ‘in 1857 we had mutineers and murderers of women and children to deal with; and a moment’s hesitation, prompted by motives of humanity, might have ruined the State. It is .  .  . a very different matter when we have to consider what should be done with a small band of miserably armed Sikh fanatics’.127 Another article, in the Spectator, claimed that it was ‘morally wrong for a Christian government ruling a conquered population to order wholesale massacres because that population, after trying resistance, had submitted itself to our justice and our mercy’.128 Comparisons to the excessive violence perpetrated by Governor Edward Eyre during his brutal suppression of the 1865 Morant Bay Uprising in Jamaica also figured prominently in these discussions.129 But even as the tide of public opinion began to turn against the executions, many continued to support Cowan and Forsyth and the Punjab to treat criminals when captured in the regular course of law; that is to say, to hand them over for trial to proper tribunals’: GOI to the PG, 30 April 1872, ibid., p. 55.  Reynell Taylor, ‘The Kooka Outbreak: Letter to the Editor’, The Times, 17 February 1872, p. 10. 125  William Ford, ‘Letter to the Editor’, The Times, 12 February 1872, p. 10. 126  T.H. Thornton, ‘The Kooka Executions: Letter to the Editor, The Times, 19 March 1872, p. 12. 127  ‘The Kooka Insurrection’, The Morning Post, 19 February 1872, p. 3. 128  ‘The Executions in the Punjab’, The Spectator, 10 February 1872, p. 9. 129  See Kostal, Jurisprudence of Power. 124

Panic, Exemplary Punishment, and 1872 ‘Kooka Outbreak’

133

School of executive privilege they represented. After it became public knowledge that Cowan had been suspended pending the GOI’s inquiry, a strongly worded letter by the former Lieutenant-Governor of Punjab, D.F. McLeod, appeared in the Times, condemning the ‘severe blow’ that had been given ‘to all chances of vigorous and independent action in future, when emergencies may arise’. ‘I fear the British public do not as yet at all apprehend how critical is our position in India’, McLeod continued, ‘and if, when overt, unprovoked outrages occur, our officers are deterred from independent and vigorous action, the most disastrous results may be looked for’.130 A subsequent letter by Lieutenant-General A.T. Cunynghame, who was stationed at Lahore during the 1863 Sitana campaign, made this point even more forcefully by arguing that Punjab’s turbulent and wayward inhabitants could be only controlled by a strong, uncompromising, and forceful authority: The inhabitants of the Punjab are the most warlike of any of the natives in India, and history shows us that none have given us more trouble and anxiety to subdue. During the period of my command there was no actual outbreak within my divisions, but so frequent and dangerous were the symptoms of discontent that constant vigilance was exercised for its repression, and the fact of its not occurring was, in my opinion, mainly due to a feeling among the people of the energetic measures which would instantly be resorted to for its suppression.131

‘As regards our Indian possessions’, he continued, ‘the natives of that country are very apt to misconstrue our acts of leniency as due to timidity, whereas there is nothing they so much admire as vigour in the administration of the law. In that country we live upon a mine, which may at any moment explode’.132 The other uncomfortable fact that remained was that large numbers of Indians actually strongly supported the executions. Following the GOI’s final decision against Cowan and Forsyth, the Punjab Government received numerous petitions of protest signed by nearly 800 local notables, village officers, and other prominent figures across Punjab.133  A. Kinnard and D.F. McLeod, ‘The Kooka Outbreak: Letter to the Editor’, The Times, 15 May 1872, p. 6. 131  A.T. Cunynghame, ‘The Kooka Outbreak: Letter to the Editor’, The Times, 16 May 1872, p. 10. 132  Ibid. 133  See NAI, Home/Judicial A/January 1873/nos. 124–6. According to one petition, Cowan and Forsyth had ‘adopted laudable and wise measures for the suppression of the mischief and disturbance caused by the Kukas, and awarded exemplary punishment to that reckless sect; and it is owing to this really good management that we have been relieved of the apprehension of their evil intentions and desires to take hold of the country, and have become safe and secure’: Letter from Sardar Bishan Singh, Rais of Kalsiah, 28 June 1872, ibid. 130

134

Law, the Punjab School, and the ‘Kooka Outbreak’ of 1872

McLeod and Cunynghame’s ominous warnings about the catastrophic consequences of censuring these officers or placing limits on the executive authority of Punjab officials were emblematic of the Punjab School and the deep-seated, pervasive sense of vulnerability and anxiety that underpinned it. Interestingly enough, this same culture of anxiety became the one of the main focuses for the ongoing debate within the press. Though Cowan’s actions were initially hailed as being bold and decisive, the British public increasingly came to view them instead as the overreaction of a panicked officer who appeared ‘to have lost his head and to have done what all impartial and cool-judging men must disapprove and regret’.134 Even those who defended Cowan and Forsyth were forced to concede that the decision to execute the rebels had been premised on a hasty, inflated misapprehension about the actual extent of the danger.135 The deeply critical Pall Mall Gazette went even further, arguing that this was not just the result of the poor judgment of these two individual officers, but was symptomatic of a much more systemic culture of ‘continual strain and anxiety’ that permeated the entire Punjab administration. ‘They feel that at very short notice they may be exposed to murder and outrage’, it claimed, ‘and the consequence is that they are in just the state in which little is necessary to lead them into what some people call acts of vigour and what others call acts of ferocity’.136 Indeed, rather than being acts of strength, the newspaper argued, such ‘frightful’ measures were expressions of weakness and fear. In the end, the press concluded that the GOI’s decision to censure Forsyth and to remove Cowan from his post was justified and necessary. As the Times of India put it, ‘the Government of India has proved worthy of itself and the British name by wholly condemning that utterly needless slaughter of the disarmed and demoralized Kuka raiders’.137 To do otherwise, argued the Pall Mall Gazette, would be to affirm ‘the principle that every district officer in India is entitled, whenever he thinks it desirable, to set aside the established law of the land, and to substitute for it a new procedure and new punishments devised by himself’.138 Cowan’s Indian  A. Civilian, ‘The Kooka Outbreak: Letter to the Editor’, The Times, 7 June 1872, p. 12.  In a letter to the editor of the Times, William Forsyth attempted to defend his brother by arguing that: ‘It is one thing to sit in an official arm-chair when all danger is over, and on a review of all the circumstances to come to the conclusion that the peril was exaggerated; it is another thing to have to deal on the spot with an armed outbreak, and then to feel that unless prompt and severe measures had been taken the province might have been in a flame’: William Forsyth, ‘The Kooka Outbreak: Letter to Editor, The Times, 10 June 1872, p. 14. 136  ‘Emergencies in India’, The Pall Mall Gazette, 22 May 1872. 137  ‘Editorial’, The Times of India, 4 May 1872, p. 2. 138  ‘The Kooka Executions’, The Pall Mall Gazette, 18 May 1872. 134 135

Conclusion135

career was never able to recover from the severe blow dealt to it by his handling of the ‘Kooka outbreak’. Following his dismissal, Cowan unsuccessfully attempted to petition Viceroy Lord Northbrook (1872–6) to be reinstated,139 but ultimately received nothing more than his small pension and some donations generated by a fundraising campaign organised by his supporters.140 Despite being the archetypal embodiment of the heroic Punjab administrator – speedy, bold, and unafraid to make difficult decisions in order to preserve the safety and security of British rule at any cost – Cowan’s executive zeal had no place in a post-codification world of Indian jurisprudence that took a dim view of officers who transgressed the bounds of the law. Moreover, instead of being praised for their bravery, both Cowan and Forsyth were ultimately condemned by the Indian authorities and public alike for having lost their heads, panicked, and made a rash decision in the heat of the moment. ‘Summary orders’, the GOI concluded, ‘are often taken for acts of vigour, when they are in truth acts of weakness. Such orders frequently show that those who give them doubt their own strength, and are afraid to be merciful to their opponents’.141 Bruised, but not beaten, Forsyth actually managed to recover from the affair, and eventually went on to have a long and successful career after being transferred to the Commissionership of Awadh. He also remained unrepentant about his role in the ‘Kooka outbreak’ until the end of his life, and in his posthumously-published autobiography, he once again defended his decision to support Cowan.142 3.5 Conclusion In the weeks and months following the suppression of ‘Kooka outbreak’, tensions ran high within the Punjab administration after rumours began to circulate that a second uprising was imminent.143 Though information was vague and confused – some reports speculated the rising would ­centre around Amritsar during the festival of Holi, while others claimed that it would begin in the Sikh holy city of Anandpur Sahib during the  ‘This Evening’s News’, The Pall Mall Gazette, 4 August 1873.  ‘Letter to the Editor’, The Englishman, 14 May 1872. 141  GOI to the PG, 30 April 1872, Kooka Outbreak, p. 56. 142  ‘Looking back on the past, after a long lapse of years’, he wrote, ‘I fully adhere to the decision which I hastily arrived at, at the time of the Kooka outbreak, to support my subordinate’: Ethel Forsyth (ed.), Autobiography and Reminiscences of Sir Douglas Forsyth, C.B., K.C.S.I., F.R.G.S (London: Bentley and Sons, 1887), p. 41. 143  On 6 February 1872, Cowan reported that he had received warnings to this effect from a local Sikh sirdar who also claimed that the loyalty of Sikh soldiers could not be counted on in the event that this did occur: Cowan to Forsyth, 6 February 1872, NAI, Home/Judicial A/June 1872/nos. 107–11. 139 140

136

Law, the Punjab School, and the ‘Kooka Outbreak’ of 1872

harvest festival of Vaisakhi – colonial authorities took the threat seriously.144 After personally visiting the Ludhiana district and interviewing various leading figures from within the Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh communities, Lieutenant-Governor Davies became convinced that drastic measures were required to maintain public order.145 Ram Singh and his leading subahs (captains), who had been languishing in an Allahabad jail since the initial outbreak, were swiftly deported to Rangoon; assemblies of more than five Namdharis were banned throughout the province; carrying iron-bound sticks, axes, or any other weapons that did not fall explicitly under the provisions of the Arms Act was prohibited; village headmen and local officials were given strict instructions to report on the movements of any Namdharis through their districts; additional police and military forces were deployed; and detailed information was collected on every known member of the sect, so that ‘no movement of the smallest importance can possibly take place without the Government being instantly aware’.146 In March of 1872, Davies also requested that the GOI grant him emergency powers to make ‘sudden arrests’ without the need to obtain warrants from either the courts or Viceroy, as was required under even the notorious and draconian Regulation III of 1818.147 At the same time that the Punjab Government was scrambling to ­prevent this second ‘Kooka’ uprising, the GOI was faced with the difficult and ‘painful’ decision of how to respond to Cowan’s evidently illegal and brutal undertakings at Malerkotla. On the one hand, officials were aware that they could not simply allow their officers to take the law into their own hands, and to inflict ‘abhorrent’ punishments with ‘indiscriminate severity’. ‘The effect of condoning such a step’, Stephen wrote, ‘would be nothing less than the establishment of a permanent system of government by something worse than ordinary martial law. It would be a return to the principles of Runjeet Singh’.148 On the other hand, however, Stephen himself conceded ‘that the danger of a Kooka revolt, which might at any moment become a general Sikh revolt, is imminent, and . . . we ought to couple whatever proceedings may be taken against  PG to the GOI, 2 April 1872, NAI, Foreign/Political A/May 1872/no. 40.  Minute by the Lieutenant-Governor of Punjab, 26 February 1872, NAI, Home/Judicial A/June 1872/nos. 107–11. 146  PG to the GOI, 2 April 1872, NAI, Foreign/Political A/May 1872/no. 40. 147  PG to the GOI, 9 March 1872, NAI, Foreign/Political A/March 1872/nos. 323–4. In reply, the GOI wrote that the Lieutenant-Governor of Punjab already had that power, with one officer noting that ‘an officer in the Lieutenant-Governor’s position will be cordially supported in all reasonable measures he may take for the safety of the State’: Note by C.U.A., 16 March 1872, ibid. 148  Note by J.F.S., 14 March 1872, NAI, Home/Judicial A/June 1872/nos. 112–32. 144 145

Conclusion137

the officers in fault with measures which will clearly show our determination to preserve the peace’.149 The GOI feared that any censure of Cowan and Forsyth would erode British prestige and be read as a sign of weakness at a critical moment when further trouble was expected. Indeed, as much as the GOI may have deprecated Cowan’s actions, they, along with the Punjab Government, remained convinced that he had prevented a more serious uprising from occurring.150 As Stephen put it: ‘The evil on the one side is disavowing our agents and shaking the authority of Government throughout the province. The evil on the other side is, accepting the responsibility of a cruel massacre – for it was nothing less.’151 In the end, the highly anticipated second rising never materialised. Nevertheless, this non-event is still deeply revealing of the anxieties and legal tensions that permeated the colonial Indian administration in the wake of the ‘Kooka outbreak’. While the suppression of the outbreak was clearly the outcome of a set of deeply-entrenched beliefs that characterised the Punjab School of governance, it was also reflective of a much more widespread and pervasive set of assumptions that characterised British colonial power more generally. As we have seen, British ideals about the rule of law in India competed with the equally powerful, yet profoundly anxious belief that strong executive authority, coercion, and exemplary punishments were necessary to preserve the safety and stability of the colonial regime. Although the GOI attempted to attribute the executions at Malerkotla to the excesses of flawed individuals who had lost their heads, panicked, and acted contrary to the guiding principles of British rule, Cowan, Forsyth, and their supporters claimed that they had, in fact, acted in defence of this foundational and essential imperative of c­ olonial rule. ‘Admitting fully the general principle which influences all civilized Governments of tempering justice with mercy’, Forsyth claimed, ‘I would refer to the history of the Punjab, and I may say India also, to see whether in times of incipient rebellion, or of insurrection, severe examples have not generally been the rule.’152 While the official and public reactions to the executions at Malerkotla demonstrate that there were  Ibid.  Note by J.S., 16 March 1872, NAI, Home/Judicial A/June 1872/nos. 112–32; Note by N., 4 April 1872, ibid.; Minute by the Lieutenant-Governor of Punjab, 26 February 1872, NAI, Home/Judicial A/June 1872/nos. 107–11. 151  Note by J.F.S., 14 March 1872, NAI, Home/Judicial A/June 1872/nos. 112–32. 152  Forsyth also alluded to statements made by Viceroy Lord Elgin (1862–3) to the effect that nascent rebellions and insurrections needed to be quashed with absolutely and uncompromising severity: Mr. Forsyth’s ‘First Statement of 1st July 1872’, NAI, Home/ Judicial A/October 1872/nos. 88–95, paras. 36, 40. For Elgin’s statement, see Theodore Walrond (ed.), Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin: Governor of Jamaica, 149 150

138

Law, the Punjab School, and the ‘Kooka Outbreak’ of 1872

certain limits to this logic, both the Punjab Government’s subsequent authoritarian crackdown against the Namdharis, and the GOI’s agonised proceedings over how to deal with Cowan and Forsyth, suggest that this remained a potent and influential idea that was difficult to uproot in a political climate that remained deeply concerned with the potential for rebellion and disorder.153 Even after publicly and privately denouncing the brutality and illegality of the executions, Stephen, for instance, remained convinced that the British needed to retain strong forms of executive authority and their sovereign ability to punish their colonial subjects. ‘Think how you would obey an army of stern soldiers who just crushed everyone who did certain things and left them alone if they did not’, he asked his close friend and Under-Secretary of State for India, M.E. Grant Duff, in a letter written in February of 1872. ‘It is in this way indeed’, Stephen continued, ‘that we all obey the laws of nature. If you could argue with small pox you would not care so much about vaccination’.154 According to Stephen, military power and coercion were essential requirements of upholding British rule, which sat atop a ‘powder-barrel’.155 Stephen’s acknowledgment of the precarious position of British power in India demonstrates how the sense of insecurity and vulnerability that underpinned the Punjab School’s authoritarian and despotic tendencies was much more widespread than is often recognised. These fears, in fact, extended all the way to metropolitan Britain. In a speech in the House of Commons sometime after the conclusion of the ‘Kooka’ affair and the recent Lushai expedition along India’s North-Eastern frontier, Grant Duff concluded that: No one is fit to have anything to do with the affairs of that country who is not thoroughly impressed with the belief that whatever fate may have in store for us the time has not yet come when we can say that all is safe and quiet beneath that volcanic soil. Possibilities of danger are always around us, and he must have read Indian history to little profit who is surprised if at any moment some unregarded trifle leads to infinite trouble and alarm.156

Governor-General of Canada, Envoy to China, Viceroy of India (London: John Murray, 1872), p. 414.  Davies’ insistence on obtaining legal sanction from the GOI for making sudden arrests against Namdharis, for instance, may have attested to a renewed cautiousness about transgressing the bounds of the law, but was nonetheless reflective of a ‘jurisprudence of emergency’ that sought to safeguard the colonial regime at any cost: Hussain, Jurisprudence of Emergency. 154  Stephen to Grant Duff, 4 February 1872, BL, IOR, Mss Eur F234, p. 11. 155  Ibid., pp. 9–12. 156  Hansard, Parl. Deb. 6 August 1872, vol. 213, col. 572. 153

Conclusion139

The fact that Stephen actually looked to the ‘almost unlimited discretionary power’ of the Punjab system as a sort of ‘model’ for his own brand of codification, both before and after this incident, is also quite telling.157 Many of the foundational principles of the Punjab system – strong executive authority, simplified procedures, and administrative efficiency – were actively incorporated into legislation implemented by Stephen, most notably in the 1871 Criminal Tribes Act.158  Thus while the ideals of codification may have placed more pressure on colonial officials to adhere to the rule of law, this did not necessarily entail the elimination of strong executive powers. Indeed, as we shall see in Chapter 4, both Stephen and Maine supported the creation of ‘exceptional’ legislation that imbued colonial officers with frighteningly wide discretion when it came to punishing ‘fanatical’ criminals along the NWF.

 Stephen, Minute on the Administration of Justice, p. 7.  Singha, ‘Punished by Surveillance’; Major, ‘State and Criminal Tribes’.

157 158

4

Frontier Terror and the Murderous Outrages Act of 1867

Every influence, every motive, that provokes the spirit of murder among men, impels these mountaineers to deeds of treachery and violence. The strong aboriginal propensity to kill, inherent in all human beings, has in these valleys been preserved in unexampled strength and vigour. That religion [Islam], which above all others was founded and propagated by the sword – the tenets and principles of which are instinct and incentives to slaughter and which in three continents has produced fighting breeds of men – stimulates a wild and merciless fanaticism. Winston Churchill, The Story of the Malakand Field Force1

4.1 Introduction After finishing dinner on the evening of 7 December 1919, Mrs Florence Emmett and her family gathered in the bedroom of her husband, Mr Frederick Emmett, the station master of the Peshawar Cantonment railway, who was bed-ridden with fever. At some point, the Emmetts’ eldest son, aged 17, left the bedroom and proceeded towards the dining room. As he entered the sitting room adjacent to the dining room, the young man spotted an unfamiliar Indian man coming in from a doorway leading outside to the garden. When questioned, the intruder immediately produced an axe he had been hiding behind his back and lunged towards the Emmetts’ son. The young man quickly raised his left forearm to ward off the impending axe swing, but the sheer force of the blow

This chapter is based on two previously published articles, but both the scope and the main thrust of its argument have been significantly expanded. See Mark Condos, ‘Licence to Kill: The Murderous Outrages Act and the Rule of Law in Colonial India, 1867–1925’, Modern Asian Studies, 50:2 (2016): pp. 479–517 and ibid. ‘“Fanaticism” and the Politics of Resistance along the North-West Frontier of British India’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 58:3 (2016): pp. 717–45. 1  Winston Spencer Churchill, The Story of the Malakand Field Force: An Episode of Frontier War (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1899), p. 5.

140

Introduction141

shattered his arm in several places. The two men then closed with each other, and a fierce struggle ensued. Upon hearing her son’s cries for help, Mrs Emmett rushed over from the nearby bedroom to offer assistance. By the time she entered the sitting room, the assailant had dropped his axe and was now stabbing her son with a dagger. Mrs Emmett, who was pregnant at the time, charged towards the attacker and threw her arms around him in an attempt to grapple him. The man then began to stab at Mrs Emmett, grazing her nose and stabbing her in the side. In spite of her wounds, Mrs Emmett desperately maintained her hold on the attacker. By this point, Mr Emmett managed to rouse himself from his sick bed and also joined in the struggle. The attacker, however, managed to wrench himself free from Mrs Emmett’s hold, and promptly stabbed Mr Emmett in the thigh. Mrs Emmett continued to struggle furiously with the attacker, and eventually managed to grab hold of the dagger and wrest it from his grip, though not without suffering serious cuts to her hand and wrist. Finally, with the aid of some servants, the Emmetts managed to overpower and subdue their assailant.2 All three members of the family were promptly rushed off to hospital, where the conditions of both Mrs Emmett and her son were pronounced as critical. The man responsible for the attack, identified merely as a ‘ghazi’ and ‘murderous fanatic’, was promptly tried, sentenced, and executed.3 The attack on the Emmett family was an example of a very special type of crime that existed at the fringes of British India. Known variously as  ‘murderous outrages’, ‘fanatical outrages’, or ‘ghazism’, these were crimes that typically involved a sudden, seemingly unprovoked, and murderous assault against British personnel or their Indian ­subordinates. Sporadic attacks of this nature began shortly after the British assumed direct control of the frontier in 1849, and occurred right up until Independence in 1947. These attacks terrified the colonial establishment, highlighting the vulnerability, weakness, and inability of the colonial regime to protect its own in what was seen to be one of the most dangerous and ‘­ turbulent’ regions within the entire British Empire. In order to deal with these crimes, the GOI enacted one of the most ­brutal-minded and draconian laws ever conceived of in British India: the

 Mrs Emmett later earned minor acclaim in the press, and she was even awarded the prestigious Albert Medal in 1920 for her courage and bravery. The fact that she was pregnant at the time of the assault was omitted from all public accounts due to ‘feelings of delicacy’: NAI, Home/Public A/March 1920/nos. 281–2; The London Gazette, 17 August 1920, p. 8477. 3  Hamilton Grant to the GOI, 12 February 1920, NAI, Home/Public A/March 1920/ nos. 281–2. 2

142

Frontier Terror and the Murderous Outrages Act of 1867

Murderous Outrages Act (MOA) of 1867.4 The MOA granted c­ olonial officials wide-ranging powers to prosecute individuals identified as ‘fanatics’ in Punjab, and later Baluchistan and the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP).5 Under the articles of this law, any ‘fanatic’ convicted of murder or attempted murder against a European or those working in their employ was liable to death or transportation for life, with all their property being forfeited to the state. No juries were allowed for these cases. Instead, the accused were tried by a special tribunal consisting of a Commissioner and two other executive officers with full magisterial powers.6 Sentences were meant to be carried out immediately. There was no review, and no appeals were permitted.7 These special tribunals were even allowed to ignore evidence and witnesses if they were thought to have been ‘offered for the purpose of vexation or delay’.8 Offenders tried under the MOA were almost invariably executed, usually within a day or two of their arrest and trial, and sometimes even on the same day. Afterwards, their bodies were often incinerated as a terrible warning to others who might contemplate committing a similar ‘outrage’. Although justifications for this extraordinary law hinged on claims that it was absolutely necessary to protect British lives and uphold British prestige in a region where the exigencies of colonial governance were ‘different’ from the rest of India,9 the MOA was far from peripheral in   Murderous Outrages in the Punjab, Act No. XXIII of 1867, in W. Theobold, The Legislative Acts of the Governor General of India in Council, from 1834 to the End of 1867; with an Analytical Abstract Prefixed to each Act,Vol. 5: 1866–7 (Calcutta: Thacker, Spink & Co., 1868), BL, IOR, V/8/119. 5  The MOA was extended to Baluchistan in 1881 and its provisions were re-enacted at the creation of the NWFP under the auspices of the Murderous Outrages Regulation: NAI, Foreign/Political A/October 1881/nos. 353–5; NAI, Foreign/Frontier A/August 1901/ nos.  63–72. In the case of the attack on the Emmett family, the perpetrator was tried under the Murderous Outrages Regulation. 6  In cases where a Commissioner was not available, the Deputy Commissioner could be deputed to fill his place, and subordinate officers, including the Assistant and Extra Assistant Commissioners would be called upon to act as the assessors. Executive officers, therefore, could include Commissioners, Deputy Commissioners, Assistant Commissioners, and Extra Assistant Commissioners. An amendment to the MOA ­following its renewal in 1877 extended to Sessions Judges the same jurisdiction in these matters that had been previously reserved solely for executive officers: No. 9 of 1877: A Bill to Revive and Amend Act No. XXIII of 1867’, Gazette of India, 1877: Pt.V, BL, IOR, V/11/45. The original intention of restricting these powers to executive officers appears to have been aimed at ensuring that only Europeans would be able to sit on these tribunals. Colonial officials, however, seemed to have been somewhat flexible when it came to adhering to this rule, and there were cases where Indians were able to serve as members: NAI, Foreign/A. Pol. E/June 1884, 704–14. 7  Murderous Outrages in the Punjab, BL, IOR, V/8/119, paras. 2, 7, 10, pp. 460–2. 8  Ibid., para. 5, p. 461. 9  Difficulties in enforcing a regular judicial system, for example, led to the introduction of a series of special regulations in 1872 known as the ‘Frontier Crimes Regulations’. 4

Introduction143

Figure 4.1  Map of the North-West Frontier, c. 1901

These regulations represented an attempt to govern Pashtun society according to what the British believed were their own customs and traditions: PG to the GOI, 17 September 1886, BL, IOR, L/P&J/6/202, file 776, pp. 301–4. For more on this, see Benjamin D. Hopkins, ‘The Frontier Crimes Regulation and Frontier Governmentality’, The Journal of Asian Studies, 74:2 (2015): pp. 1–22; Robert Nichols, The Frontier Crimes Regulation: A History in Documents (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2013).

144

Frontier Terror and the Murderous Outrages Act of 1867

both its origin and impact. As we shall see, British fears of ‘fanatical’ criminality in India stretched back to the early nineteenth century, and the MOA was actually modelled on an earlier law that was designed to contain a similar threat posed by Malabar’s Mappila community. Nevertheless, the MOA was innovative and new in several important respects. In addition to providing a key way of resolving the inherent tension between preserving strong forms of executive authority and the renewed British emphasis on the rule of law that proliferated during codification era of the 1860s and 1870s,10 the MOA also created the powerful new political-legal category of the ‘fanatic’. Unlike the category of the ‘Moplah’, which was bounded territorially and ethnically, the ‘fanatic’ was a much more ambiguous and elusive figure. Instead of providing a clear explanation of what constituted ‘fanaticism’, the MOA granted officers wide discretion on this point. As such, the term ‘fanatic’ became a sort of blank discursive label that could be manipulated by the creative and often flexible interpretations of individual colonial officials, making what was already a powerful form of executive prerogative even more deadly. In so doing, the MOA actually came to serve as a model for other colonial governments across India about the ways that similar legislation could be used to enable swift, summary, and uncompromising reprisals against other forms of supposedly ‘fanatical’ anti-colonial resistance, particularly during the growing revolutionary nationalist movement in the first half of twentieth century. The MOA gave sanction to a veritable regime of ‘terror’ in which the most violent and brutal aspects of colonialism were able to assert themselves under the guise of law. Although Elizabeth Kolsky has recently explored these same issues in her own work on the MOA, she has not satisfactorily explained how this was more than merely a ‘frontier phenomenon’.11 Her work has also crucially overlooked the cultural role of fear in mediating and determining the violent responses of the colonial state. This chapter aims to bring both of these important issues into our understanding of this law. It argues that the durability, longevity, and adaptability of the MOA not only offers us an important glimpse into the workings of British colonial legality in India, but also tells us a great deal about the anxious and fearful nature of the colonial insecurity state more generally. By pointing to the existential dangers faced by British personnel along the frontier, the colonial state was able justify the creation of  See Hussain, Jurisprudence of Emergency, pp. 5, 7.  Elizabeth Kolsky, ‘The Colonial Rule of Law and the Legal Regime of Exception: Frontier “Fanaticism” and State Violence in British India’, American Historical Review, 120:4 (October 2015): pp. 1218–46.

10 11

The Dangers of Fanaticism and the Moplah Act145

an ‘exceptional’ piece of colonial legislation that allowed its officers to assume the ‘sovereign’ authority to punish and kill on a regular basis. As such, it provides yet another striking example of how the perceived vulnerability and weakness of the colonial regime was used to activate some of its most authoritarian and violent tendencies. 4.2

The Dangers of Fanaticism and the Moplah Act

British concerns about the dangers of ‘fanaticism’ in India can be traced back to the debates over the establishment of Christian missions in the first two decades of the nineteenth century, when many Company officials worried that missionary activity would inflame the ‘excitable’ religious sensibilities of their Indian subjects. In his testimony given to the parliamentary committee tasked with investigating the issue in 1813, Thomas Graham, a former member of the Governor-General’s Council, claimed that ‘nothing would so much excite their animosity, as any attempt to interfere with their religion’.12 But while both Hindus and Muslims were considered to be overly jealous of preserving their particular religious ‘prejudices’ and ‘superstitions’, it was the latter group who was singled out as being particularly combustible.13 As Thomas Sydenham, the former Resident to Hyderabad, put it, ‘I do not know any description of men who are more jealous of any violation or insult offered to their habits and prejudices than the Mussulmen, from that character of bigotry and fanaticism for which they have been distinguished, I believe in every period.’14 Warren Hastings issued a similarly ominous warning when he was summoned before the committee. India’s Muslims, he claimed, were ‘bigots more ferocious than any that have shed blood of their brethren in Europe. If a fanatic should arise, amongst them, and preach the doctrines inculcated in their koran [sic], I do not think it impossible that he might excite the zeal of thousands of abettors, and a religious war be the consequences of the first provocation.’15 British colonial authorities, therefore, remained deeply apprehensive and suspicious of the activities of a number of so-called ‘fanatical’  PP, 1812–13 (122) VII.1, Minutes of Evidence taken before the Committee of the Whole House, and the Select Committee on the Affairs of the East India Company, p. 50.  Muslims, as David Motadel has argued, were widely considered by European imperial powers to be uniquely sensitive subjects who were difficult to govern and prone to violence as a result of their inherently ‘fanatical’ tendencies: David Motadel, ‘Introduction’, in David Motadel (ed.), Islam and the European Empires (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 2. 14  PP, 1812–13 (122) VII.1, Minutes of Evidence, p. 311. See also Letter from the GG to the Secret Committee, 2 November 1807, ibid., pp. 41–5. 15  Ibid., p. 8. 12

13

146

Frontier Terror and the Murderous Outrages Act of 1867

Muslim communities throughout India.16 The julaha (weaver) communities of North India, for example, were frequently described by British authorities as a ‘bigoted’ and ‘fanatical’ Muslim caste.17 In so doing, these officials obscured the socio-economic grievances that drove julaha participation in a series of disturbances between 1813 and 1849 by recasting these events within a ‘law and order’ narrative in which the colonial state was forced to intervene in order to correct rampant ‘caste-bound lawlessness’.18 This same ‘criminalising rationale’ was also used to great effect in constructing similar, ethnographically-driven typologies that were used to brand other Indian communities as hereditarily ‘predatory’ or ‘criminal’, including the Bhils, Pindaris, Thugs, and Sansiahs.19 The colony of so-called ‘Hindustani fanatics’ that was established in 1831 by the followers of Sayyid Ahmed of Rai Bereilly near Sitana along the NWF provides yet another example of enduring British anxieties and concerns over the existence of ‘fanatical’ criminal organisations.20 One of the most notorious ‘fanatic’ Indian communities identified by the British were the Mappilas (known in colonial terminology as ‘Moplahs’) of the Malabar Coast. Between 1836 and 1921, the Mappilas were at the centre of a series of violent agrarian revolts that were fuelled by a complex combination of economic, political, and communal grievances, and mobilised and articulated through a language of ritual and religiosity.21 The British colonial authorities at the time, however, dismissed any notion that these movements were symptoms of economic hardship or represented a form of political action, and instead blamed them on the inherently ‘fanatical’ tendencies of the Mappilas. In a Minute from February 1852, Henry Pottinger, the Governor of Madras, confidently declared that ‘Their murderous outrages appear

 The main difference was that after 1857 British colonial authorities began to conceive of Muslim ‘fanatics’ as belonging to a universal, pan-Indian insurrectionary fraternity: Alex Padamsee, Representations of Indian Muslims in British Colonial Discourse (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), pp. 46, 49, 62. 17  Gyan Pandey, ‘The Bigoted Julaha’, Economic and Political Weekly 18:5 (January 1983): pp. 19–28. 18  Padamsee, Representations of Indian Muslims, p. 57. 19  Yang, Crime and Criminality in British India; Freitag, ‘Crime in the Social Order of Colonial North India’; Singha, A Despotism of Law; Major, ‘State and Criminal Tribes’; Wagner, Thuggee. 20  Magnus Marsden and Benjamin D. Hopkins, Fragments of the Frontier (London: Hurst & Company, 2011), chap. 3; Benjamin D. Hopkins, ‘Islam and Resistance in the British Empire’, in Motadel, Islam and the European Empires, pp. 157–8. 21  K.N. Panikkar, Against Lord and State: Religion and Peasant Uprisings in Malabar, 1836– 1921 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989); David Arnold, ‘Islam, the Mappilas and Peasant Revolt in Malabar’, The Journal of Peasant Studies, 9:4 (1982): pp. 255–65. 16

The Dangers of Fanaticism and the Moplah Act147

to be solely caused by revenge and fanaticism’.22 T.L. Strange, a local judge who was subsequently appointed as the head of a special commission to i­nvestigate these disturbances, reached a similar conclusion. In his exhaustively compiled and meticulously researched report, Strange found that ‘in no instance can any outbreak or threat of outbreak that has arisen be attributed to the oppression of tenants by landlords’.23 Instead, Strange fixated on the ritualistic and religious aspects of these revolts, cementing the notion that Mappila violence could be understood entirely as a product of religious ‘fanaticism’. ‘The pride and intolerance fostered by the Mahomedan faith’, he wrote, ‘coupled with the grasping, treacherous and vindictive character of the Moplahs . . . have fomented the evil’.24 Strange’s interpretation of these events also led him to one other crucial conclusion: that these uprisings were not merely the result of actions undertaken by a few individual participants, but were encouraged, abetted, and celebrated by the entire Mappila community. In so doing, Strange created an enduring image of the Mappilas as an inherently and irredeemably ‘fanatical’ and violent community.25 Aside from its shocking revelations about the extensive depravity of the Mappilas, Strange’s report also painted a disturbing picture of an embattled colonial administration that appeared to be utterly incapable of effectively dealing with these so-called ‘fanatics’. According to Strange, the region’s predominantly Hindu landlords were living in a near-constant state of anxiety and terror as a result of these attacks. ‘No one knows who may next be struck down, or on what pretence’, he wrote. ‘They live among a nation . . . of anticipated murderers . . . and have to maintain guards for their houses and to live in a sort of constant siege’. Both the police and the judicial system, Strange pointed out, had proven themselves to be ‘wholly ineffectual’ in containing the Mappila menace. The ‘unseemly’ and costly use of British troops to suppress these outbreaks, he noted, was also becoming increasingly untenable. In light of the administration’s evident inability to maintain law and  Minute by Pottinger, 6 February 1852, in Correspondence on Moplah Outrages in Malabar, for the Years 1849–53, vol. 1 (Madras: The United Scottish Press, 1863), BL, IOR, V/27/262/20, p. 263 [hereafter Correspondence on Moplah Outrages]. 23  Strange to Pycroft, 25 September 1852, in ibid., p. 440. 24  Ibid., pp. 443–4. 25  As one editorial in The Bombay Times and Journal of Commerce from 1855 put it, the Mappilas were ‘turbulent, refractory, blood-thirsty, and revengeful fanatics’, who possessed a ‘deep-rooted prejudice and hatred against those opposed to their creed’. Their ‘vengeance is wreaked in blood’, it continued, ‘and should the forfeiture of life be entailed on any one of them, in their sanguinary conflicts, Paradise is held out as the reward, the sure and certain recompense for this “martyrdom!”’: Editorial, The Bombay Times and Journal of Commerce, 3 October 1855, p. 546. 22

148

Frontier Terror and the Murderous Outrages Act of 1867

order, or ensure the safety of its own subjects, Strange argued that drastic measures were required to restore British prestige and confidence in the government. ‘Conciliation and forbearance have been long tried, and have failed in any degree to palliate the evil’, he wrote. ‘I am convinced, therefore, that for the protection of the country it has become absolutely necessary to shape out laws calculated to meet the peculiar phase of crime that has appeared in it’.26 After reading Strange’s report, Pottinger wholeheartedly concurred. As he put it, ‘an atrocious spirit of fanaticism has . . . now attained a height that forbids any hope that it will die away of itself, or that it can be extirpated unless through the most decided and permanent repressive measures on the part of the Government’.27 In October of 1854, the Indian Legislative Council passed a landmark law to decisively deal with these persistent ‘fanatical’ outbreaks. The Act for the Suppression of Outrages in the District of Malabar (Act XXIII of 1854), more popularly known as the Moplah Act, granted the colonial state extensive powers to detain, prosecute, and inflict communal punishments against individuals or groups connected or even suspected of being connected with these attacks.28 It also included the brutal-minded proviso that allowed the bodies of convicted Mappilas who had either been executed or killed in action to be incinerated.29 The destruction of the body in this manner, it was believed, would ‘terrify’ Mappila ‘fanatics’ who otherwise embraced death and martyrdom by denying them entry into Heaven as a reward for their actions.30 Colonial officials and the public alike applauded the Act for its highly coercive and despotic provisions, arguing this was the only way to effectively deal with such a viciously ‘fanatical’ community.31 In addition to its striking similarities to other draconian colonial legislation that targeted habitually ‘criminal’ communities, including the Thuggee Act of 1836 or the later Criminal Tribes Act of 1871, the Moplah Act set an important precedent for  Strange to Pycroft, 25 September 1852, Correspondence on Moplah Outrages, p. 454.  Minute by Pottinger, January 1853, ibid., pp. 485–6. 28  Many of these provisions were based on suggestions initially made by Strange in his report: Strange to Pycroft, 25 September 1852, ibid., pp. 455–66. 29  Section 3 of the Act contained the proviso regarding incineration: ‘Act No. XXIII of 1854, An Act for the Suppression of Outrages in the District of Malabar’, in William Plumbridge Williams, The Acts of the Legislative Council of India Relating to the Madras Presidency from 1848 to 1855 (Madras: The Church of Scotland Mission Press, 1856), BL, IOR, V/4589, p. 294. 30  ‘The Malabar Coercion Bill’, The Bombay Times and Journal of Commerce, 21 November 1854, p. 4757. 31  ‘Its provisions were strict almost beyond the precedents of Ireland, and the crime also was beyond all European precedent. The Magistrate was rendered despotic, and nothing but responsible despotism can keep a race at once fanatic, Mussulman, and oriental to the observance of their social duties toward idolators’: ibid. 26 27

Frontier Fanatics and the Legalisation of Lawlessness149

understanding and responding to so-called ‘fanatical’ criminality. By reducing Mappila grievances to the inevitable expressions of an endemically ‘fanatical’ and ‘bigoted’ community, colonial authorities fundamentally de-politicised their actions and effectively rendered them as nothing more than signifiers of barbarism, backwardness, and lawlessness. These terrifying, sub-human figures, it was believed, could neither be reasoned with nor controlled through conventional means, and therefore needed to be excluded from the ordinary legal order. As we shall see, these were all key features that would later be incorporated into the MOA. 4.3

Frontier Fanatics and the Legalisation of Lawlessness

In the previous chapter, we saw how the brutal and unlawful suppression of the 1872 ‘Kooka outbreak’ sparked an intense imperial debate over the moral and legal limits of executive authority in India. The central issue in this debate was the extent to which (if any) colonial officers had the right to transgress written laws and procedures in order to safeguard the colonial regime. Although the officers involved in the suppression of the ‘Kooka outbreak’ were ultimately punished for their illegal and ‘inappropriate’ actions, both the anguished proceedings of the GOI as well as the acrimonious public debate that ensued showed how this remained a bitterly contested issue. While on the one hand officials recognised that strong executive action was sometimes necessary, the excessive severity of Cowan and Forsyth’s response exposed the terrible results that could occur when officers mistakenly applied this prerogative in a state of panic. This section examines how colonial officers were faced with a similar dilemma when it came to protecting British ­personnel and punishing ‘fanatical outrages’ along the NWF. As we shall see, these attacks terrified and disgusted the colonial establishment, and provoked an almost uncontrollable desire for revenge that threatened the moral legitimacy of colonial legality. The MOA was thus conceived of as a way resolving this issue by empowering officials to exact swift and terrible reprisals against those who perpetrated these crimes, but under the auspices of the rule of law. By couching the colonial state’s sovereign need to punish and kill within the language of the law, the MOA granted what was otherwise a brutal and fundamentally vindictive procedure the veneer of necessity and respectability, and insulated British officers against the same fate that would later befall Cowan and Forsyth. Like the Mappilas of Malabar, the Muslims of the NWF were depicted as an inherently turbulent, violent, and ‘fanatical’ community. Shortly after assuming control of the frontier in 1849, the new Punjab Government bluntly described the region’s Pashtun inhabitants as

150

Frontier Terror and the Murderous Outrages Act of 1867

‘priest-ridden fanatics, and bigoted followers of the Prophet’.32 Another report from 1865 claimed that ‘Mohamedanism, as understood by them, is no better, or perhaps is actually worse, than the creeds of the wildest races on earth. In their eyes the one great commandment is blood for blood, and fire and sword for all infidels’.33 According to G.R. Elsmie, the Additional Commissioner and Sessions Judge for Peshawar in 1873, ‘there is evidently something in the air of the frontier which rouses brutality in every Mahomedan’.34 Winston Churchill also helped cement this enduring image of ‘frontier fanaticism’ in a series of letters he wrote for the London Daily Telegraph and his later published volume, The Story of the Malakand Field Force (1899).35 Knowing full well the dangers they faced along the frontier, the ­earliest British administrators selected to govern this region came from predominantly military backgrounds. In true Punjab School fashion, these rugged and resilient soldier-administrators were meant to ‘tame’ this ‘wild’ region through a combination of sheer strength of character and military force. In so doing, however, many of them became prominent targets for those who resented and resisted the encroachments of the colonial state. During his settlement of Bannu between 1848 and 1849, Herbert Edwardes had been the target of two separate assassination attempts.36 Both Reynell Taylor and John Nicholson also experienced similar attempts against their lives during their respective tenures along the frontier.37 In late January of 1856, for example, Nicholson reported that he had been obliged to shoot and kill a ‘fanatic’ named Painda Khan who had attacked him at the entrance of his compound. In his report, Nicholson stated that Khan had ‘become religiously insane some months ago’, and concluded that such an incident was unsurprising ‘in a country in which so much religious enthusiasm still exists’.38 Between 1849 and  PAR 1849–50 & 1850–51, para. 89, p. 27.  Richard Temple and R.H. Davies, Report Showing the Relations of the British Government with the Tribes of the North-West Frontier of the Punjab from Annexation in 1849 to the Close of 1855; and Continuation of the Same to August 1864 (Lahore: Punjab Government Press, 1865), BL, IOR, V/27/273/1/1, para. 106, p. 62. 34  Elsmie to MacNabb, 11 November 1873, BL, IOR, P/137, no. 6, December 1873, para. 9, p. 927. 35  Churchill, The Story of the Malakand Field Force. 36  Herbert Edwardes, A Year on the Punjab Frontier in 1848–49, 2 vols., 2nd ed. (London: Richard Bentley), vol. 1, p. 71. See also Political Diaries of Lieut. H.B. Edwardes, Assistant to the Resident at Lahore 1847–1849 (Allahabad: The Pioneer Press, 1911). 37  Political Diaries of LieutenantReynell G.Taylor, Mr.P. SandysMelvill, Pandit Kunahya Lal, Mr. P.A. vans Agnew, Lieutenant J. Nicholson, Mr. L. Bowring and Mr A.H. Cocks, 1847– 1849 (Allahabad: The Pioneer Press, 1915). 38  Nicholson to the PG, 21 January 1856, NAI, Foreign/Frontier A/6 June 1856, nos. 171–85, para. 2, fp. 270. 32 33

Frontier Fanatics and the Legalisation of Lawlessness151

1867, a total of 16 Europeans and their Indian subordinates were killed or wounded in similar sorts of attacks.39 On the afternoon of 28 February 1866, a particularly shocking episode of murderous outrage occurred when the wife of Lieutenant Ashton Brandreth, the Executive Engineer of Kohat, was shot straight through the collar bone at close range with a double-barrelled pistol while being carried in her jampan (a closed litter) near the Kohat cantonment bazaar. Fortunately for Mrs Brandreth, the injury was not fatal and her attacker was quickly overpowered and arrested by a group of nearby sepoys before he was able to fire off his second shot.40 The man responsible for the attack, an Afridi named Summad, readily admitted to the crime when he was brought before the British authorities. Under section 307 of the Indian Penal Code, the highest punishment permitted for attempted murder was transportation for life, but in light of the fact that this was the third such attack in the span of a year, Colonel J.R. Becher, the Commissioner of Peshawar, decided that it was ‘necessary to adopt more than ordinary measures to prevent an evil so grave and so fraught with political consequences’ from reoccurring. On 3 March, Becher ordered the immediate execution of Summad without obtaining permission from the Punjab Chief Court, knowing full well that in so doing he was exceeding his judicial authority and violating the Indian Penal Code. ‘The fierce fanaticism directed against the lives of the ruling race of India is a special danger of this frontier’, Becher wrote in his ­judgment, ‘and one which requires to be taken into account in determining punishment’.41 Instead of being reprimanded or criticised for his illegal decision, both the Punjab Government and the GOI fully supported Becher, and he was subsequently indemnified against prosecution.42 Becher justified his extraordinary handling of Summad’s case by arguing that fanaticism represented an existential threat British rule that could not be dealt with under the ordinary procedures of the law. However, whereas Becher was merely content to let the matter rest, the Punjab Government used this opportunity to press the GOI for the enactment of ‘special legislation’ in order to deal with similar offences,

 Legislative Council Proceedings, 4 January 1867, BL, IOR, V/9/10, p. 6. Nine Europeans and one Indian official were killed or injured in the Peshawar, Kohat, and Hazara districts between 1851 and 1865: PG to the GOI, 17 April 1867, NAI, Foreign/Political A/ May 1867/nos. 30–1, no. 30. 40  Shortt to the PG, 1 March 1866, NAI, Foreign/Political A/March 1866/nos. 131–3, no. 30, paras. 2–3. 41  Court of the Commissioner of Peshawur Division, 3 March 1866: The Crown versus Summad Afreedee, NAI, Foreign/Political A/March 1866/nos. 137–9, no. 138. 42  GOI to the PG, 16 March 1866, NAI, Foreign/Political A/March 1866/nos. 131–3. 39

152

Frontier Terror and the Murderous Outrages Act of 1867

‘more severely and promptly . . . than is authorised by the Indian Penal Code and Code of Criminal Procedure’.43 The unlikely man tasked with the creation of this ‘special’ new legislation was none other than Henry Maine. As we saw in the previous chapter, Maine was deeply suspicious and critical of the Punjab School and its repeated attempts to resist adhering to India’s new judicial codes. Indeed, one of Maine’s primary concerns during the drafting of the MOA was that the extraordinary powers granted by the new law might be used by the Punjab authorities as yet another way of bypassing or subverting these codes. He noted with some alarm, for instance, how certain amendments proposed by the Punjab Government after reviewing his original draft bill amounted to ‘little less than a proposal to suspend all regular law throughout the Punjab in a very large number of cases of murder and attempted murder’. In light of this Maine went so far as to make the somewhat astonishing recommendation that the government should abandon its attempt to legislate altogether and revert to its previous policy of handling these cases ‘extra-legally as they arise’.44 Becher’s illegal execution was not the first time a British officer had taken the law into their own hands in order to deal with these types of ‘fanatical’ crimes, and up until this point, the GOI had been always been satisfied to retroactively pardon officers who committed these infractions. Even the British government back in the metropole was aware of and supported these practices.45 As Maine put it, ‘The Government would always support one of its officers in a case where summary procedure was justifiable and he would not be likely, through the very want of the law, to put it in force rashly’.46 Although there were numerous other officials who agreed with Maine that it would be preferable to continue to deal with these cases in an ad hoc, extra-judicial manner,47 the recent and sensational imperial scandal surrounding Governor Eyre’s brutal suppression of the 1865 Morant Bay Uprising in Jamaica made others much more wary of the perils involved in transgressing legal boundaries.48 Combined with the renewed emphasis that codification placed on adhering to the rule of law, even the most inveterate champions of executive authority found

 PG to the GOI, 5 March 1866, ibid., no. 131, para. 8.  Minute by Maine, 11 September 1866, in Minutes by Sir H.S. Maine, pp. 93, 95. 45  Legislative Council Proceedings, 22 February 1867, BL, IOR, V/9/10, p. 89. 46  Minute by Maine, 11 September 1866, in Minutes by Sir H.S. Maine, p. 95. 47  These included Becher himself, as well as Henry Marion Durand: NAI, Foreign/Judicial A/March 1867/nos. 12–14. 48  Legislative Council Proceedings, 21 December 1866, BL, IOR, V/9/9, p. 245; Legislative Council Proceedings, 22 February 1867, BL, IOR, V/9/10, p. 89. See also Kostal, Jurisprudence of Power. 43 44

Frontier Fanatics and the Legalisation of Lawlessness153

themselves urging caution when it came to dealing with these types of attacks. In November of 1866, for example, Lieutenant-Governor McLeod pointed out how it was no longer advisable to leave these cases up to the ‘discretion’ of local officers because ‘The timid would shrink from transgressing the law, while the bold might use the license indiscreetly, and under any circumstances’.49 Even Viceroy John Lawrence, one of the principal architects of the Punjab School, insisted that it was now necessary to ensure that frontier officials were able to deal with these types of crimes legally.50 One of the main reasons that government officials finally decided it was necessary to give legal sanction to the well-established practice of summarily executing frontier ‘fanatics’ was that they recognised how these attacks inflamed a nearly uncontrollable and rancorous desire for revenge among their own officers. This had been particularly evident following the assault against Mrs Brandreth. Though this was by no means the first case of a ‘fanatical outrage’ against a European, it was the first time that an attack of this nature had targeted a woman.51 As Elizabeth Kolsky has argued, the language of ‘outrages’ in Victorian society had strong associations with sexual attacks against women.52 In India this had an even more powerful resonance, since the murderous assault of a darkskinned Indian man against a white woman also evoked traumatic memories of the ‘Mutiny’ when the domestic sanctity of British ­households and the honour of their women had been violated. Combined with the deep sense of hatred that frontier officials already harboured towards these types of ‘fanatical’ assassins, their desire for revenge in the wake of the assault against Mrs Brandreth was particularly conspicuous. Captain G. Shortt, the Deputy Commissioner of Kohat and magistrate who tried the case, for example, noted with ‘regret’ how Summad had been

 Memorandum by D.F. McLeod, 20 November 1866, BL, IOR, P/438/15, no. 14, p. 15.  ‘I think it would be better’, he wrote ‘not to allow our officers to act extra vires. . . I think that on the whole it is a lesser evil politically to insist on officers acting in accordance with the law, than to authorise a violation of the law, such violation of the law is understood by the people, and is considered more or less a grievance, and has a tendency to excite compassion for the criminal. Whereas a law however stringent, being limited to special cases, has the effect of upholding the authority of the State, and exciting a just terror in the would be murderer, while it is not objected to by the people in general. Moreover, in my mind, it has an injurious effect on our judicial officers allowing them thus to exceed their powers’: Note by Lawrence, 11 October 1866, NAI, Foreign/ Judicial/March 1867/nos. 12–14. 51  During his trial, Summad admitted that he did not know that the jampan was carrying a woman, and that he had initially intended to kill an officer: Shortt to the PG, 1 March 1866, NAI, Foreign/Political A/March 1866/nos. 131–3, no. 30, para. 4. 52  Kolsky, ‘Frontier “Fanaticism”’, p. 1229. 49 50

154

Frontier Terror and the Murderous Outrages Act of 1867

apprehended unharmed.53 Becher’s subsequent insistence that Summad be executed as swiftly as possible is also revealing of how his conception of ‘justice’ in this matter amounted to little more than the ability to inflict a rapid and terrible reprisal. The punishment for such a ‘cruel and cowardly crime’, he argued, ‘should be signal and swift for the sake of example’, and was both ‘right and expedient’.54 The attack on Mrs Brandreth, therefore, not only provided yet another poignant reminder of the apparent vulnerability of the colonial regime along the frontier, but it also highlighted how these attacks could inflame the excitable sensibilities of anxious British colonial officials. Maine was certainly cognizant of this. ‘Let us assume a fanatic to have murdered a young and well-known European lady of position’, he speculated. ‘Nobody could object to any summary procedure being brought to bear against the murderer. But then, in the panic and general indignation which would follow, what chance would persons charged with murder or attempted murder have for the next twelve months?’ Indeed, one of the principal aims of the MOA, according to Maine, was that it should provide ‘a tolerable barrier against the effects of panic or rage’.55 As he later put it during the Legislative Council debates, ‘the danger of the Bill arose from the probability of its being applied somewhat under the influence of panic, and therefore, it was desirable that the utmost reasonable time for reflection and enquiry should be secured’.56 Alongside these concerns about furious and fearful European officers brashly taking matters into their own hands, British officials were also worried that similar attacks directed against their non-European subordinates would also incite them to take action outside the bounds of the law. While it may have been attacks against Europeans that had prompted the creation of the MOA, the targets of these types of crimes were hardly confined to the white population. Sikh soldiers and police, in particular, were popular targets for assassins.57 ‘Nothing was more certain’, claimed CINC Charles Mansfield, ‘that, if we did not give our officers and our agents the means of immediately striking down such crimes as those ­contemplated by this Bill, our officers would ultimately not be able to prevent their soldiers and Police, and possibly the population, from taking  Shortt to the PG, 1 March 1866, NAI, Foreign/Political A/March 1866/nos. 131–3, no. 132, para. 10. 54  Court of the Commissioner of Peshawur Division, 3 March 1866, NAI, Foreign/Political A/March 1866/nos. 137–9, no. 138. 55  Minute by Maine, 11 September 1866, in Minutes by Sir H.S. Maine, p. 94. 56  Legislative Council Proceedings, 4 January 1867, BL, IOR, V/9/10, p. 8. 57  See NAI, Foreign/Frontier A/January 1905/nos. 7–9; ibid., Foreign/External B/October 1894/nos. 53–6; ibid., Foreign/External A/September 1901/nos. 9–21. 53

Frontier Fanatics and the Legalisation of Lawlessness155

Figure 4.2  The Supreme Indian Council Portrait by Bourne and Shepard, c. 1864. © National Portrait Gallery, London This group portrait shows the various members of the Viceroy’s Council from c. 1864. Many of these same individuals were responsible for the creation of the MOA in 1867. Pictured (standing behind from left to right) are Edward Harbord Lushington, Financial Secretary; Colonel Henry Wylie Norman, Military Secretary; Colonel Henry Marion Durand, Foreign Secretary; Edward Clive Bayley, Home Secretary; Colonel Richard Strachey, Public Works Secretary; (seated from left to right) George Noble Taylor; Sir Charles Trevelyan; Sir Hugh Henry Rose; Sir John Lawrence; Sir Robert Napier; Henry James Sumner Maine; William Grey.

the law into their own hands’.58 As Maine put it, ‘if this sort of outrage had been committed in the most civilised portions of the world – let us say in the cities of London or Paris . . . the murderer would have run much risk of being torn to pieces by the mob’.59 For Maine and many other colonial officials, then, the MOA was seen as both an absolutely essential way of checking these types of frontier attacks, as well as a way of regulating the conduct of their own personnel.  Legislative Council Proceedings, 15 March 1867, BL, IOR, V/9/10, pp. 199–200.  Ibid., p. 196.

58 59

156

Frontier Terror and the Murderous Outrages Act of 1867

At a time when both Indian and wider imperial developments were making it increasingly taboo and dangerous for colonial officers to transgress their legal authority, the MOA presented a crucial opportunity for officials in India, Maine foremost among them, to rein in and regulate admittedly illegal practices that had long prevailed along the frontier. When the MOA bill was first introduced, the Legislative Council remarked that they ‘could easily imagine the feeling of utter insecurity, not to say also of vehement indignation, on the part of the small European community, when one of their number lost his life, by the hand of some fanatical miscreant, so long as the murderer remained unpunished’.60 Recognising the sheer sense of fear, acrimony, and desire for revenge these sorts of attacks inspired in the local British population along the frontier, authorities chose to channel these sentiments and grant them the appearance of legality and respectability through legislation. As such the MOA was a striking example of what John and Jean Comaroff have referred to as ‘lawfare’ – the use of legal codes, charters and warrants, administrative regulations, and states of emergency – to ‘impose a sense of order upon its subordinates by means of violence rendered legible, legal, and legitimate by its own sovereign word’. Indeed, one of the quintessential features of lawfare, is that it ‘always seeks to launder brute power in a wash of legitimacy, ethics, propriety’.61 Maine himself perhaps expressed this sentiment best during the Legislative Council debates over the MOA. ‘The Bill’, he argued, ‘was not so much a Bill permitting officers on the trans-Indus frontier to order summary execution, as a Bill recognising the fact that summary trial and execution were occasionally unavoidable in the trans-Indus territory, but placing the practice under regulation and restraint’.62 As such, the MOA, and other similar laws, offer an important glimpse into the underlying priorities and logic that lay at the heart of British conceptions of colonial legality. Legal codification, as we have seen, was an ideologically and politically divisive issue. In the aftermath of 1857, wary Indian administrators believed that substantive legal codes, which regulated their own conduct as much as that of their colonial subjects, would erode their prestige, and weaken the executive authority necessary to maintain the safety and security of the colonial regime. As a result, lawmakers like Maine and Stephen worked hard to demonstrate that these new laws could serve the dual purpose of upholding British power  Legislative Council Proceedings, 21 December 1866, BL, IOR, V/9/9, p. 245.  Comaroff and Comaroff, ‘Law and Disorder’, pp. 29–31. 62  Legislative Council Proceedings, 4 January 1867, BL, IOR, V/9/10, p. 8; Legislative Council Proceedings, 22 February 1867, ibid., p. 89. 60 61

A Regime of   Terror157

as well as the rule of law. Stephen, for instance, was deeply concerned about undermining the status of district officers, and his emphasis on the need for the British to remain ‘hands-on’ rulers was reflected in his legislative work. As he put it, ‘the best possible security for executive vigour is to define precisely by express law thrown into the clearest and shortest form the amount of discretionary power to be given to judicial and executive officers’.63 The Criminal Tribes Act of 1871, for example, enabled district officers and magistrates to retain a considerable amount of discretionary power when it came to enforcing the provisions of the law.64 Officers were also encouraged to engage periodically in ritualised inspection tours of police stations where criminals would be rounded up and paraded in order to symbolically reaffirm the ‘sovereign’ power the British officer held over them.65 It is also interesting to note that in the wake of the ‘Kooka outbreak’, Stephen actually toyed with the notion of introducing a law similar to the Moplah Act for dealing with Punjab’s Namdhari community.66 Codification, therefore, was never meant to erode executive power and weaken the position of India’s ‘ruling race’; rather, it was meant to bolster, strengthen, and reinforce it. 4.4

A Regime of   Terror

In his report on the Mappilas, Strange noted that one of the main problems with these ‘fanatics’ was that they were not just unafraid of death, but often actively sought martyrdom: ‘those who have carried out their purposes have done so with the avowed desire of seeking death in arms against “kafirs” [infidels], with the view of obtaining the joys in their fancied paradise; and most religiously have they kept their resolution’.67 Ordinary execution, therefore, seemed hardly a sufficient punishment for these types of individuals, and Malabar officials looked to the more culturally specific punishment of incinerating the bodies of dead Mappilas as a way of deterring these crimes. Burning was intended to exploit what the British believed was a strong superstition among Muslims: that this would destroy the soul and prevent the ‘fanatic’ from ascending to Heaven as a reward for their actions. During the deliberations over the MOA bill, officials drew inspiration from the  ‘Men under those circumstances’, he continued, ‘know the limits of their power, and act within it vigorously’: Stephen, Minute on the Administration of Justice, p. 94. 64  Stephen, ‘Legislation under Mayo’, p. 155. 65  Singha, ‘Punished by Surveillance’. 66  Note by J.F.S., 14 March 1872, NAI, Home/Judicial A/June 1872/nos. 112–32. 67  Strange to Pycroft, 25 September 1852, Correspondence on Moplah Outrages, BL, IOR, V/27/262/20, p. 442. 63

158

Frontier Terror and the Murderous Outrages Act of 1867

Mappila precedent as a way of dealing with their own brand of frontier ‘fanatics’. John Lawrence, for one, was a strong supporter of burning, believing it would instil ‘a just terror in the would be murderer’. ‘I am in favor of burning the body of a Mahomedan assassin’, he explained, ‘not that I desire to outrage his corpse, but that knowing that burning it has a deterrent effect on the Native mind, I consider that we are fully justified in making use of such a superstition’.68 Henry Marion Durand was another firm believer in the efficacy of incineration. ‘With the masses’, he argued, ‘it enhances the effect of the punishment’.69 Though not explicitly alluded to during the discussions over the drafting of MOA, the British practice of cannonading that was used against both Indian rebels in 1857 and later the ‘Kookas’ in 1872 was premised on the same idea of both terrifying Indian spectators and also denying the individuals access to the afterlife through the destruction of their bodies.70 In addition to its deterrent effect, the destruction of the body had the added benefit of preventing the graves of ‘fanatics’ from being converted into ziarats (shrines) and becoming sites of reverence and inspiration for similar acts.71 Although Lawrence and Durand were both staunch proponents of incinerating the bodies of executed ‘fanatics’, many of other official remained deeply uneasy about this practice. Lieutenant-Governor McLeod, for instance, believed that deliberately defiling Muslim burial rites would simply engender greater hatred for the British and make administering the frontier even more difficult.72 Becher and his successor, F.R. Pollock, expressed similar disapproval for this measure.73 As a result of these objections, no specific mention about burning was made in the

 Note by John Lawrence, 11 October 1866, NAI, Foreign/Judicial A/March 1867, nos. 12–14. 69  Note on Question of the Burning of the Dead Bodies of Ghazis by E.H.S. Clarke, 12 June 1895, NAI, Foreign/ Secret F/May 1896/nos. 322–32. 70   Wagner, ‘“Calculated to Strike Terror”’. In April of 1900, F.D. Cunningham, the Superintendent and Commissioner of the Peshawar Division, did actually suggest that fanatics might be executed with cannons, but his recommendation does not seem to have been taken under serious consideration by his colleagues. ‘I am inclined to think’, Cunningham wrote, ‘that blowing from a gun might be more effectual – it strikes more dread. . . There is nothing inhuman or barbarous in it, and nothing in hanging to compel us to stick to it alone. One nation beheads, another kills malefactors by an electric shock, another by the Garrotte, we hang; I see no reason why we should not blow from a gun’: Note by F.D. Cunningham on the Suggestion for Checking Murders of which the Motive is Religious Fanaticism, 3 April 1900, BL, IOR L/PJ/6/583, file 2012. 71  MacNabb to the PG, 14 November 1873, BL, IOR, P/137, p. 925. 72  Letter no. 380–1129 from the PG to the GOI, 1 September 1866, BL, IOR, P/438/15, para. 9. 73  See Pollock to the PG, 14 August 1866, ibid.; Copy of Memorandum by Colonel J. Becher, 11 August 1866, ibid. 68

A Regime of   Terror159

Figure 4.3  ‘Execution of a Ghazi, or Mohammedan Fanatic, at the Peshawur Gate, Jellalabad’, The London Illustrated News, 8 February 1879 (author’s own collection)

new law. Instead, largely at the insistence of Viceroy John Lawrence,74 the wording of the section that covered the disposal of bodies was left purposefully vague, empowering the Commissioner who passed the ­sentence  Report on the Question of the Burning of the Dead Bodies of Ghazis by E.H.S. Clarke, 12 June 1895, NAI, Foreign/Secret F/May 1896/nos. 322–32.

74

160

Frontier Terror and the Murderous Outrages Act of 1867

to use their own discretion in the matter.75 Although legislators were evidently uneasy about burning, frontier officers frequently seized upon the opportunity to incinerate the bodies of convicted ‘fanatics’ when disposing of these cases.76 An official enquiry by the GOI into the incidence of burning, for example, found that between 1883 and 1895, the bodies of at least 17 convicted ‘fanatics’ had been burned in Punjab and Baluchistan, leading to the conclusion that ‘it has been almost the invariable practice to burn the bodies of Ghazis’.77 Those who supported the practice of burning deployed a range of psychological and cultural explanations in order to explain why this brutal measure was so necessary when it came to dealing with these ‘fanatics’. Unlike ordinary criminals, ‘fanatics’ were depicted as standing entirely outside bounds of society, politics, and even sanity. As Roland Littlewood has pointed out, psychiatric and medicalised language was often used to discredit acts of resistance by colonised peoples. By reducing certain forms of undesirable behaviour to pathologies, colonial authorities were able to render the statements and actions of their subjects as unworthy of serious consideration.78 The political and e­ conomic grievances of the Mappilas, as we have seen, were wholly ignored by colonial officials. Instead, they were represented as ‘mad dogs’, and the problem of ‘fanaticism’ was depicted as a ‘disease’ that had managed to ‘infect’ the entire Mappila community.79 In a similar vein, ‘fanaticism’ along the frontier was also depicted as a sort of ‘virus’ or ‘disease’ that permeated the Muslim socio-cultural world there, and burning was seen as a quasi-medical way of cauterising the wound and preventing infection from spreading.80  Murderous Outrages in the Punjab, Act No. XXIII of 1867, BL, IOR, V/8/119, para. 7, p. 462. By omitting the specific provision about burning, it was also noted how this would enable officers to inflict similarly punitive measures against the bodies of Hindu ‘fanatics’ by burying them. 76  There were numerous reported MOA cases where fanatics’ bodies were burned. See, for example, NAI, Foreign/A. Pol. E./June 1884/nos. 704–14; NAI, Foreign/A. Pol. E./July 1884/nos. 5–6; NAI, Foreign/External B/July 1892/no. 150 and NAI, Foreign/External B/October 1894/nos. 53–6. 77  Report on the Question of the Burning, NAI, Foreign/Secret F/May 1896/nos. 322–32. 78  Roland Littlewood, Pathologies of the West: an Anthropology of Mental Illness in Europe and America (London: Continuum, 2002), pp. 26–7. See also James H. Mills, Madness, Cannabis and Colonialism: The ‘Native-Only’ Lunatic Asylums of British India, 1857–1900 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000); Nile Green, Islam and the Army in Colonial India: Sepoy Religion in the Service of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 79  Conolly to Madras Government, 13 September 1849, in ‘Editorial’, The Bombay Times and Journal of Commerce, 13 October 1849, p. 711; Collett to Clarke, 7 January 1856, Correspondence on Moplah Outrages, vol. 2, BL, IOR, V/27/262/21, p. 239. 80  Note on the burning of the bodies of Muhammadan Fanatics after execution by Captain C. Archer, August 1897, NAI, Foreign/Frontier A/August 1901/nos. 63–72. Writing in April 1896, Major-General James Browne, the Agent to the Governor-General in 75

A Regime of   Terror161

It is important to note, however, that not all British officials were such enthusiastic supporters of this cruel practice. Richard Bruce, who served as the Political Agent at Quetta in 1877, bore first-hand witness to several incidents of ‘murderous outrage’ during his career, and was severely critical of burning. Not only did this practice embitter Muslim opinion against the British and serve to encourage further attacks, Bruce argued, but it was also wholly ineffective as a deterrent. ‘But even supposing it did act as a deterrent’, he wrote, ‘is it worthy of a great Christian civilising Government to resort to such a doubtful means of preventing crime as the taking advantage of a religious belief that the burning of the body bars the entrance of the soul to Heaven or Paradise?’81 LieutenantGovernor Dennis Fitzpatrick (1892–7) was another strong opponent of burning, and was deeply disturbed by the evidently widespread prevalence of this practice. Like Bruce, Fitzpatrick believed that incineration served only to ‘create a feeling of disgust against us in the minds of loyal Mussalmans’.82 In February of 1896, acting on the direct advice of Fitzpatrick, the GOI even went so far as to issue a formal ban against the practice of incineration except in ‘extreme and exceptional cases when there may be good reason to believe that such a measure will check, or put a stop to, what might be called an epidemic of assassination of fanatics’.83 Following the GOI’s official ban on burnings, they remained relatively rare along the frontier. Viceroy Lord Curzon (1899–1905), however, took an altogether different stance on the subject of burning than his predecessor. In a speech delivered at a durbar in Quetta on 12 April 1900, Curzon forcefully announced his intention to use any means necessary to put a stop to these sorts of attacks once and for all.84 True to his word, Curzon made the war against frontier ‘­f anaticism’ one of his Baluchistan, claimed that the only way to stamp out the ‘bacillus of the ghazi rabies’ was to destroy that ‘which can only be fed by the hopes of a future life, can only be starved by the collapse of all future spiritual hopes for the soul, as the result of the annihilation of the body’: Browne to the GOI, 8 April 1896, NAI, Foreign/Secret F/May 1896/nos. 322–32. 81  Richard Isaac Bruce, The Forward Policy and its Results; or Thirty-Five Years’Work Amongst the Tribes on Our North-Western Frontier of India (London: Longman, Green, and Co., 1900), p. 245. 82  Ibid. 83  GOI to the PG, 20 February 1896, NAI, Foreign/Secret F/May 1896/nos. 322–32. See also GOI to Hamilton, 19 May 1896, ibid. 84  ‘I wish you to cherish no illusions’, he stated, but ‘I am determined, so far as lies in the power of Government, to put a stop to these abominable crimes. I shall shrink from no punishment, however severe’: Thomas Raleigh, Lord Curzon in India: Being a Selection from His Speeches asViceroy & Governor-General of India, 1898–1905 (London: Macmillan and Co., 1906), p. 413.

162

Frontier Terror and the Murderous Outrages Act of 1867

top priorities, and set about contemplating new ways to make the punishment for these types of crimes even more severe.85 In 1905, Curzon officially reversed his predecessor’s decision to prohibit burnings, and actually called for an expansion of the practice, stating that it ‘should be adopted as a general rule’.86 Although this certainly pleased a number of frontier officials who had been deeply distressed by the GOI’s decision to ban burning in 1896, it ultimately did not prove effective in stopping these types of attacks. Indeed, many officials by this point had come to realise that burnings appeared to have little impact in deterring these attacks, and had actually begun to envision news forms of punishment specifically designed for the unique psychology of these ‘fanatics’. In November of 1900, Captain C. Archer argued that ‘death is a singularly inappropriate punishment for criminals who profess to look, and in most cases do sincerely look, upon death as a desirable thing’. Instead, Archer argued that the British should deny these individuals their martyrdom and subject them to a series of ‘degrading’ and severe public floggings that would humiliate and shame them in the eyes of their peers, thus removing any notion that these were somehow glorious and uplifting actions.87 Other officials suggested ‘fanatics’ should be sentenced to life  In 1901, for example, Curzon briefly considered having prisoners flogged before being executed and then burned, though this was eventually abandoned in light of objections raised by Hugh Barnes, the former Revenue Commissioner for Baluchistan under Robert Sandeman: Note by Curzon, 8 March 1905, NAI, Foreign/Secret F/July 1905/ nos. 178–82. H.A. Deane, the Chief Commissioner of the NWFP, for one, was a great enthusiast for this type of punishment, and lamented the fact that flogging was not incorporated into the newly-enacted Murderous Outrages Regulation in the NWFP in 1901: ‘I venture to think that it is much to be regretted that the Regulation does not allow flogging, combined with execution, followed by burning. The fanatic may be flogged and sentenced to imprisonment for life, but if flogged for the murder, he must not be hanged. I confess that it has often struck me that a frontier officer might have first tried the murderer, say, for a theft of a cartridge, or similar offence, and flogged him for this; and thereafter tried the man for the murder, and quietly spirited him away to a down country jail to be hanged, as allowed by the Regulation. Flogging on the bare person is absolutely awful disgrace to a Pathan; every frontier officer knows this, and yet it is rarely resorted to. The effect is infinitely more deterrent than the fear of hanging. If we could only flog, hang, and burn, how much more so it would be’: Qtd. in Note by E.H.S. Clarke, 8 March 1905, ibid. Clarke himself noted how, ‘If it so pleased the Court, there is nothing to prevent the Court from ordering a fanatic to be hanged, drawn, and quartered’: ibid. 86  GOI to Deane, 13 March 1905, NAI, Foreign/Secret F/July 1905/nos. 178–82. 87  Archer to the Agent to the GG in Baluchistan, 13 November 1900, BL, IOR, L/PJ/6/583, file 2012, pp. 45–6. This was advocated by several of Archer’s colleagues as well: Colvin to the Agent to the GG in Baluchistan, 4 January 1901, ibid., p. 40; Yate to the GOI, 22 January 1901, ibid., p. 38. 85

A Regime of   Terror163

imprisonment and hard labour in one of the jails located in the plains of India, where the hotter climate would provide ‘a very real terror’ to individuals who were used to the much cooler temperatures of the frontier.88 The added benefit of both these punishments was that they allowed time for the criminal to ‘cool down’ from their ‘fanatical frenzy’, so that they could appreciate the full extent of the punishments being inflicted upon them.89 Thus, aside from their overtly physical aspects, these new punishments emphasised the need to maximise the psychological impact they had. Whether it was through the shame of being whipped, the terror of being exiled from the company of one’s countrymen and imprisoned in a foreign land, or ensuring that ‘fanatics’ could fully appreciate the effects of their punishment, British officials increasingly concerned themselves with the destruction and punishment not just of the body, but of the mind and soul themselves. The British reliance on brutal forms of exemplary punishment in India, as Kim Wagner has pointed out, deeply complicates any Foucauldian reading of colonial power.90 From the grisly public execution of ‘Kooka’ rebels in 1872, to the macabre fascination with destroying the souls of Mappila and frontier ‘fanatics’ by burning their corpses, the colonial state regularly resorted to singularly brutal and spectacular displays of power in an attempt to ‘terrify’ recalcitrant colonial subjects into submission. The British preoccupation with exploiting perceived ‘native’ superstitions concerning the destruction of the soul also spoke to a peculiar colonial desire to operate – at least to some extent – within the realm of mysticism and magic that seems hard to reconcile with idea of ‘modern’, ‘civilising’ state. These types of regimes of colonial terror, as Michael Taussig points out, were fundamentally borne from the irrational anxieties, fears, and nightmares of the colonisers themselves, who perceived the purported savagery of the colonised and then attempted to project that violence back upon them through a distorted process of ‘mimesis’.91 The ‘fanatic’, as we have seen, was a terrifying figure who existed wholly ‘beyond the pale’, and thus needed to be completely obliterated. Fear and terror, in this case, became mutually-constitutive, and helped produce an extreme form of colonial violence.

 Ramsay to the Agent to the GG in Baluchistan, 31 October 1900, ibid., p. 43.  See MacDonald to the Agent to the GG in Baluchistan, 3 April 1900, ibid., p. 51; Colvin to the Agent to the GG in Baluchistan, 4 January 1901, ibid., p. 40. 90  Wagner, ‘“Calculated to Strike Terror”’. 91  Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man, p. 133. 88 89

164

Frontier Terror and the Murderous Outrages Act of 1867

4.5

Locating the ‘Fanatic’

At around 3 p.m. in the afternoon on 17 February 1931, Assistant Commissioner of Charsadda Captain Barnes finished his lunch and proceeded back to his court. As he passed through the garden to his compound, Barnes was approached by a man named Habib Nur, who was carrying a piece of paper in his hand. When Barnes reached out to accept what he believed was a petition, Habib Nur suddenly pulled out a revolver he had been hiding under the sheet of paper and fired two shots at Barnes at point-blank range. Miraculously for Barnes, both shots somehow misfired, and before Habib Nur was able to fire again, he tackled him to the ground and wrestled him into submission with the aid of his two orderlies. The next day, Habib Nur was taken to Peshawar for trial. During his trial, the British authorities fixated on the fact that Habib Nur’s revolver had been fully loaded and that 12 other cartridges had been found in his pockets; to them, this was ample proof of his singularly murderous intentions. In his testimony, Habib Nur claimed that he had been seeking to avenge the deaths of his father and uncle at the hands of the British government nearly 20 years earlier by committing ‘Ghaza’ against Barnes. ‘I have sacrificed my head to God’, he declared, and ‘If I am killed my other relations will come for Ghaza’. Based on this admission, and that fact that he had also been carrying three small ta’wiz (charms containing verses from the Qur’an), the court easily concluded that Habib Nur was a ‘fanatic’, and promptly found him guilty of attempted murder according to section 2 of the Murderous Outrages Regulation of 1901. He was executed the following day, 19 February, in the Peshawar jail.92 When news of Habib Nur’s execution emerged, there was a public outcry. Two days after the execution, demonstrators organised a hartal in the town of Utmanzai to protest what they saw as the unjust killing of Habib Nur by the government.93 As word of these events spread outside of the NWFP, the GOI eventually found itself dragged into the controversy, and, on 24 February, a special session of the Indian Legislative Assembly was convened to discuss the matter.94 The ensuing debate saw a tense and heated exchange between the government and opposition benches. After an opening speech by Ziauddin Ahmad, in which he strongly criticised  Telegram no. 6114 from the NWFP Government (Gov’t) to the GOI, 23 February 1931, NAI, Home/Political/1931/no. 4/V.   Telegram from the NWFP Gov’t to the GOI, 24 February 1931, NAI, Home/ Political/1931/nos. 4/V. 94  Letter to the President of the Legislative Assembly from Ziauddin Ahmad, 21 February 1931, NAI, Home/ Political/1931/no. 4/V. 92

93

Locating the ‘Fanatic’165

the authoritarian and irregular nature of Habib Nur’s trial, the distinguished jurist, writer, and social reformer Hari Singh Gour also rose to condemn this ‘mockery of justice’. In addition to the MOA being arbitrary, authoritarian, and atavistic, Gour argued that its application in this case had been technically illegal. He reminded the Assembly that Habib Nur’s professed motivation for committing the attack had been to avenge the death of his father and uncle, and concluded that rather than being an example of ‘fanaticism’, this had been ‘a case of pure vendetta; it was revenge’. ‘A man comes out and says, you killed my grandfather and I will you. The question is’, Gour asked, ‘is he a fanatic?’95 The MOA, he pointed out, did not even provide a definition of the word ‘fanatic’. According to the eminent judge and leader of the Praja Party, Abdur Rahim, the vagueness of this term meant that officers in the NWFP had effectively been given ‘absolute discretion to do whatever they like in order to enforce whatever they consider to be necessary in the so-called interests of peace’. ‘A man may be a religious fanatic’, Rahim argued, ‘he may be a political fanatic; or a he may be fanatic of a different character. That has not been defined. There is nothing even in the judgment, there is no evidence to show what was the motive or the intention which brought him within the category of a fanatic’.96 Indeed, no one in the Assembly seemed to be able to offer a satisfactory or authoritative definition of what constituted a ‘fanatic’.97 The elusive and ambiguous definition of exactly what constituted a ‘fanatic’ or a ‘fanatical’ act was one of the most powerful and important features of the MOA. In his testimony following the shooting of Mrs Brandreth, Summad claimed to have been fulfilling ‘God’s will’ by attacking a European, and that he had been told this was a ‘meritorious action’ by a mullah (religious leader). Based on this, both Shortt and Becher had confidently concluded that this ‘savage’ crime had been motivated by ‘religious fanaticism’.98 However, despite Becher’s ability to discern a ‘fanatical’ attack when he saw one, the precise definition of what constituted a ‘fanatic’ or a ‘fanatical’ attack remained much more ambiguous and elusive. During the drafting of the MOA, the GOI claimed that

 Legislative Assembly Debates: Official Report, vol. II, 19 February–11 March, 1931 (Simla: GOI Press, 1931), p. 1209. 96  Ibid., pp. 1214–15. 97  While some members claimed that Habib’s self-identification as a ghazi made him a ‘fanatic’, others suggested that this word simply meant ‘revenge’. One member maintained that ‘fanatics’ were defined by their belief that they would ascend to Heaven as a reward for their actions: ibid., pp. 1208, 1215. 98  Court of the Commissioner of Peshawur Division, 3 March 1866, NAI, Foreign/Political A/March 1866/nos. 137–9, no. 138. 95

166

Frontier Terror and the Murderous Outrages Act of 1867

it was unnecessary to define the word ‘fanatic’ since the preamble to the original bill made it abundantly clear to whom the new law was meant to apply: ‘Mahomedan fanatics, commonly called Gházís’, who ‘committed murderous outrages against Christians and Hindoos’.99 Various objections to this wording, however, were raised almost immediately. Both Maine and Durand, for instance, were reluctant to employ the term ghazi, since it still retained an ‘honorific’ sense,100 and its use might be considered offensive to Muslims.101 It was also considered inexpedient to single out Muslims alone, since Sikhs and Hindus had also been known to commit similar types of ‘fanatical’ crimes.102 Legislators subsequently suggested replacing the term ghazi with the expression ‘political or religious fanatic’, but this was strongly opposed by Viceroy John Lawrence, who thought it would be more difficult for the government to try these individuals if it first had to prove that their actions had been inspired by either of these motives. Rather than limiting the definition of what ­constituted a ‘fanatic’, Lawrence urged the Council to expand it.103 Lawrence’s suggestion to omit any explicit references to political or religious motives when it came to defining these sorts of crimes divided the Council. In their initial correspondence petitioning for the creation of the MOA, the Punjab Government claimed that in addition to their overtly religious overtones, these attacks often had a clear ‘political aim’ in that they attempted to ‘paralyse’ the British ability to effectively administer the frontier.104 Pointing to what he saw as the analogous case of Fenian ­‘outrages’ committed in Ireland and England, Lieutenant-Governor McLeod  A Bill for the Suppression of Murderous Outrages in Certain Districts of the Punjab, BL, IOR, P/438/13.  Derived from the Arabic word ghazw or maghāzī (raid), ghazi referred to a ‘holy warrior’ who fought in the cause of Islam: Ayesha Jalal, Partisans of Allah: Jihad in South Asia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), p. 23; Reuven Firestone, Jihad: The Origin of Holy War in Islam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 34, 96; Ali Anooshahr, The Ghazi Sultans and the Frontiers of Islam: A Comparative Study of the late Medieval and Early Modern Periods (London: Routledge, 2009), p. 2. 101  Legislative Council Proceedings, 15 March 1867, BL, IOR, V/9/10, pp. 197–8. Even so, the term ghazi (or ‘ghazee’ as it often appears in the records) remained a popular one among colonial officials, so much so that the GOI was even compelled to issue and official ban against the use of the term in official correspondence in 1900. As they put it, ‘Terms which rightly apply to “holy warfare” serve, when used in connection with foul murder, to keep alive the ignorance and mistaken credulity to which these crimes, in part, owe their origin’: GOI to the PG, 11 August 1900, NAI, Foreign/Frontier A/August 1901/nos. 63–72. 102  Pollock to the PG, 14 August 1866, BL, IOR, P/438/15, no. 13, para. 8, p. 11; Copy of Memorandum by Colonel J. Becher, 11 August 1866, ibid., p. 11. 103  Legislative Council Proceedings, 22 February 1867, BL, IOR, V/9/10, p. 90. 104  PG to the GOI, 5 March 1866, NAI, Foreign, Political A, March 1866, nos. 131–3, para. 8. 99

100

Locating the ‘Fanatic’167

remarked how it was quite difficult to tell whether these crimes were motivated by ‘religious antagonism, or in revenge for supposed injuries inflicted by an exercise of authority’. In India, he concluded, ‘it is probable that religious and political feelings have both a share in influencing the perpetrator’.105 The linkages between political and religious motivations in these attacks, Durand remarked, were ‘often close and inseparable’.106 Even Lawrence had initially conceded that ‘the two feelings are so closely blended, as scarcely to be distinguishable’.107 John Shaw-Stewart also thought it was imperative to provide ‘the utmost p ­ ossible accuracy’ in defining these crime since an individual ‘might become a fanatic from causes other than political or religious excitement’. ‘A person under the influence of hallucination, caused by the influence of opium or other intoxicating drugs’, he argued, ‘might commit acts closely resembling those against which the Bill was aimed’.108 Maine certainly preferred retaining the word ‘religious’, believing there necessarily had to be ‘some ingredient of religion in the frenzy of an assassin who was brought under this measure’.109 In the end, however, it was Lawrence who won the day. Nowhere did the new law stipulate what constituted a ‘fanatic’ or a ‘fanatical act’. In so doing, ‘fanaticism’ became an ambiguous and highly subjective, yet legally authoritative category; it was something that anyone could identify, but that no one had to define. For those who supported this measure, the logic behind it was simple enough. As CINC Mansfield put it, ‘it would be a matter of regret were the Council to encumber a somewhat anomalous procedure with a too nice definition’. By keeping the definition of fanaticism obscure, adjudicating officers could avoid being bogged by down by ‘very refined discussions’ about the applicability of the law, and devote themselves fully instead to the swift and summary disposal of these so-called ‘fanatics’.110 The vague definition given to fanaticism in the new law ensured that its provisions could be flexibly, and often creatively, applied by frontier officers. Between 1867 and 1877 the MOA was used to prosecute just five different cases.111 Over the next two decades, however, this number

 Memorandum by McLeod, 20 November 1866, BL, IOR, P/438/15, no. 14.  Note by H.M.D., 12 September 1866, NAI, Foreign/Judicial A/March 1867/nos. 12–14. 107  Note by J.L., 11 October 1866, ibid. 108  Legislative Council Proceedings, 22 February, BL, IOR, V/9/10, p. 94. 109  Ibid., p. 92. 110  Ibid., p. 93. 111  BL, IOR, P/862, Table B. 105 106

168

Frontier Terror and the Murderous Outrages Act of 1867

increased dramatically. In 1881 the law was extended to Baluchistan, and between 1881 and 1905 a total of 93 different cases of fanatical outrage were recorded in that region alone. Of these, at least 40 resulted in execution; another 16 saw the perpetrators killed outright before they could be captured; and in only 11 cases was the sentence of death commuted to either rigorous imprisonment or transportation.112 Between 1895 and 1905, there were 23 recorded cases of ‘fanatical outrage’ along the Punjab (after 1901 the NWFP) frontier. Twelve of these cases resulted in execution, eight saw the attackers killed outright, and there was even one very exceptional case where the accused was actually acquitted. In all likelihood, however, these numbers were actually even higher. In 1896, an inquiry launched by the GOI found that there were a number of cases where the law had been applied in either questionable or sometimes even entirely illegal circumstances.113 In other instances, officers had either improperly or only ‘casually’ reported MOA cases.114 As a result, it is difficult to obtain an exact picture of the frequency with which this law was used, which raises questions about how many other cases either fell between the bureaucratic cracks or were never even reported. This became such a persistent problem, in fact, that the GOI felt compelled to remind its officers that the provisions of the law were only meant to be applied to ‘true’ cases of fanatical outrages. ‘The Government of India admit that it is difficult to define what is a fanatical outrage, and what is not’, they conceded, ‘but provided that it is clearly understood that the special treatment provided for fanatical outrages is applicable to such outrages only’.115 Unfortunately for the GOI, ‘true’ cases of religious ‘fanaticism’ appear to have been relatively rare. Instead, the vast majority of these acts were motivated by a complex combination of political, cultural, and personal motives, albeit articulated through the idiom of r­eligiosity.116 In April of 1899, for instance, the Commissioner of Peshawar, F.D. Cunningham, conceded that two different ‘fanatical’ attacks that occurred within the span of a few weeks and had resulted in the murder of Lieutenant-Colonel E.H. LeMarchant and another British soldier  Statement of Fanatical Outrages in the North-West Frontier Province and Baluchistan (Simla: Intelligence Branch, Quarter Master General’s Department, 1905), BL, IOR, L/PS/20/203. 113  See, for example, Telegram from the PG to McLeod, 9 January 1869, BL, IOR, L/ PS/6/566, coll. 198; Telegram from McLeod to the PG, 11 January 1869, ibid. 114  Note on Question of the Burning of the Dead Bodies of Ghazis, 12 June 1895, NAI, Foreign/Secret F/May 1896/nos. 322–32. For further correspondence regarding the improper reporting of MOA cases, see NAI, Foreign/Frontier B/June 1896/no. 38. 115  GOI to the PG, 20 February 1896, NAI, Foreign/Secret F/May 1896/nos. 322–32. 116  Condos, ‘“Fanaticism” and the Politics of Resistance’. 112

Locating the ‘Fanatic’169

had most likely been prompted by the heightened political tensions along the frontier in the wake of the British suppression of the 1897 Uprising.117 In other cases, these attacks seem to have offered an outlet for venting personal grievances and grudges held by individuals. In May of 1898, a Pashtun man named Arsalla Khan was convicted of murdering Colonel Gaisford, the political agent of Thal Chotiali. Although the presiding officer, Colonel H. Wylie, insisted that the ‘case was one of pure “Ghaza”, in which the murderer gloried up to the last’, there was significant evidence to the contrary.118 According to E.G. Colvin, the man who first arrived on the scene after the attack, Khan had a troubled history with the British authorities in the area. Several years earlier, Khan had served in the Zhob Levy Corps at Fort Sandeman before being dismissed for bad conduct. Afterwards, he had found work as a chowkidar (watchman) in the Military Works Department, but was removed from that post after losing a key to the bungalow he guarded. ‘All this points to the probability of there having been other motives besides pure fanaticism’, Colvin concluded, ‘although I believe he had never had any dealings whatsoever with Colonel Gaisford personally, and indeed was ready to kill any sahib’.119 Returning to the case of Habib Nur, it is clear that his principal goal in attacking Captain Barnes was to avenge his family’s honour after the death of his father and uncle. During his testimony, Habib Nur claimed that his brother had already attempted to do the same, and he assured the British authorities that other members of his family would also come to seek revenge if he himself were executed.120 Habib Nur’s case was not only another uncomfortable example of how ‘true’ ‘fanatical’ crime was rarely ever so straightforward, but it was also a striking example of how the apparently flexible application of this law was given new purpose in the shifting and increasingly uncertain political landscape of British India during the nationalist struggle. During the Legislative Assembly debate, Sahibzada Abdul Qaiyum argued that ‘fanaticism’ could ‘be either of a political nature or of a religious nature’. Gesturing to the revolutionary nationalist movement, Qaiyum pointed out that religious ‘fanaticism’ was ‘fast disappearing’ in India, and

 Cunningham to the PG, 9 April 1899, NAI, Foreign/Frontier A/June 1899/nos. 107–14; Hamilton to the GG, 28 January 1898, NAI, Foreign/Secret F/April 1898/nos. 214–15; Younghusband to Cunningham, 20 June 1899, BL, IOR, L/PJ/6/583, file 2012, p. 7. 118  Wylie to the GOI, 6 April 1898, NAI, Foreign/External A/September 1898/nos. 90–104. 119  Colvin to Spence, 19 March 1898, ibid. 120  Telegram no. 6114 from the NWFP Gov’t to the GOI, 23 February 1931, NAI, Home/ Political/1931/nos. 4/V. 117

170

Frontier Terror and the Murderous Outrages Act of 1867

was increasingly being replaced by ‘fanaticism of a political nature’.121 Indeed, when the Chief Commissioner of the NWFP, Stuart Edmond Pearks, wrote to defend his administration’s handling of this case, he also suggested a connection between Habib Nur and the revolutionary movement. Citing rumours that had been circulating in the weeks leading up to the attack, Pearks claimed that ‘extremists’ connected with the high-profile revolutionaries, Bhagat Singh and Hari Kishan, had been planning to assassinate various ‘high’ officials in Peshawar and the surrounding area. Coincidentally, Habib Nur’s assault against Barnes occurred just an hour after the latter received official warning from his superiors about this supposed plot, which only seemed to confirm some sort of connection between the two.122 None of this, of course, was made public knowledge, but Pearks insisted that the MOA was intended for ‘exactly this type of outrage’ after the Assembly officially voted to censure his government on 24 February. Once again, he highlighted how this law was absolutely vital to protect the ‘ruling race’ from the myriad dangers that threatened them along the frontier: I cannot accept view that there is no necessity for special legislation to enable this Administration to deal with fanatical outrages for which the Frontier has been notorious. Further I do not consider it would be possible to maintain Law and order or to protect my Officers efficiently by repeal of this Regulation and by substituting the application of ordinary law. The skilful [sic] abuse of which has enabled Bhagat Singh and his associates to postpone their punishment for so long. I regret however that discussion of this problem cannot be kept on an academical plane. I have only too good reason for thinking that a further assassination may be contemplated at any moment, the instrument being some ill-starred fanatic and instigators one or more of terrorists who have now spread into Peshawar District from other Provinces.123

During the Assembly debate, the government representatives had also defended the execution in essentially the same terms. According to Home Member James Crerar, it was the duty of the Legislature to provide

 According to Qaiyum, the principle underlying religious ‘fanaticism’ was ‘to go to Heaven, which according to the religious fanatic was worth sacrificing one’s life for, but the present day fanatic is going in for murder, cold-blooded murder, for a little worldly gain or loss, and this is the worst kind of fanaticism’: Legislative Assembly Debates: Official Report, vol. II, 19 February–11 March, 1931 (Simla: GOI Press, 1931), p. 1222. 122  Pearks also attempted to draw a rather tenuous link between Habib Nur and one of the cousins of Abdul Ghaffar Khan, the leader of the non-violent Khudai Khidmatgar or Red Shirt Movement: Telegram from the NWFP Gov’t to the GOI, 24 February 1931, NAI, Home/Political/1931/nos. 4/V. 123  Telegram no. 623-L from the NWFP Gov’t to the GOI, 25 February 1931, NAI, Home/ Political/1931/nos. 4/V. 121

Locating the ‘Fanatic’171

‘moral assurance and support’ to its officers, who had to work in such dangerous and trying conditions. ‘In discharging their duty of protecting the frontiers of India from violation, from disorder and from hostilities from day to day’, he claimed, ‘they very literally take their lives in their hands’.124 J.G. Acheson made a similarly impassioned plea for the necessity of this law, citing how a total of 14 British officers and two women had been murdered ‘in cold blood’ in the NWFP since 1921. ‘I will go so far as to doubt whether the record will be equalled by the whole of the rest of India’, he claimed. ‘It is quite impossible’, he continued, ‘for any Government to allow its officers to be subjected to this daily risk and terrible peril to their lives, without taking, if necessary, special measures to protect them’.125 Although the GOI agreed with Pearks and its supporters in the Assembly, the vote of censure, coupled with the intense controversy generated by the case, obliged them to remind Pearks that it was ‘legally essential that the use of the Regulation should be strictly confined to cases where the motive is genuine religious fanaticism and not political’.126 As they elaborated: In present conditions of terrorist movement, when terrorists may as you envisage seek to use simple fanatics as their tools, it may be difficult to decide at once with certainty that the motive is solely religious and as you will recognise an extremely undesirable situation reacting ultimately on the safety of our officers, is likely to arise if you have to use the ordinary law against the Hindu terrorist and yet use the Regulation against the Muslim fanatic whose motive is not beyond doubt.127

Two weeks after the Assembly voted to censure the government for its handling of Habib Nur’s case, Muhammad Yamin Khan spearheaded a motion calling for the repeal of the MOA and other ‘objectionable’ regulations in force in the NWFP. Khan claimed that while he supported the right of the government to protect its officers, it should not be at the expense of people’s basic rights or violate the ‘principles and canons of law’. The application of the MOA, he argued, was far too vulnerable to the questionable discretion of individual officers, and should therefore be abolished.128 Faced with this mounting the pressure, the government conceded to convene a committee to look into this matter.129 Although

 Legislative Assembly Debates, 19 February–11 March 1931, p. 1213.  Ibid., p. 1217.  GOI to the NWFP Gov’t, 2 March 1931, NAI, Home/Political/1931, nos. 4/V. 127  Telegram no. 627-S from the GOI to the NWFP Gov’t, 2 March 1931, ibid. 128  Legislative Assembly Debates, 19 February–11 March 1931, pp. 1885–6. 129  Ibid., pp. 1892–3. 124 125 126

172

Frontier Terror and the Murderous Outrages Act of 1867

the government’s decision met with thunderous applause, it proved to be an empty promise, and frustrated Indian legislators found themselves still trying (without much success) to repeal the MOA right up until Independence in 1947. The MOA was a signal example of the colonial state’s sovereign desire to punish and kill. Like its precursor, the Moplah Act, it excluded individuals from the protection and rights normally afforded to them under regular law, and effectively relegated them to what Giorgio Agamben calls the sphere of ‘bare life’: a space where all legal rights and norms cease to exist, and where the sovereign’s power to decide is converted into the power to kill.130 However, unlike the legal category of the ‘Moplah’, which was based on religion, ethnicity, and caste, the category of the ‘fanatic’ remained much more obscure and elusive. Although the law was obviously intended to be used predominantly against the frontier’s Muslim population, officials deliberately refused to define ‘fanaticism’ in terms exclusive to either religion or ethnicity. The slipperiness of this term allowed the deadly provisions of MOA to be flexibly and often c­ reatively applied by frontier officers to a variety of crimes that, while articulated through a ‘special’ language of religiosity, were typically inspired by more common motives. By virtue of being a ‘fanatic’, individuals were denied the same rights as ordinary criminals, and could be conveniently be disposed of by anxious and vindictive British officials who believed that the best way to uphold their prestige was to make a swift and terrible example of them. 4.6

Beyond the Frontier

On 3 February 1925, the eminent Indian jurist and nationalist leader Vithalbhai Patel (the elder brother of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel) introduced a bill to the Legislative Assembly of India for the repeal of ‘repressive’ laws.131 Among the laws included in Patel’s bill were the Bengal, Madras, and Bombay State Prisoners Regulations (1818, 1819, 1827), the State Prisoners Act (1850), and the Seditious Meetings Act.132 All of these laws, Patel argued, had one thing in common: they armed the  Agamben, Homo Sacer, pp. 6, 31–2, 181.  Patel’s bill was based on recommendations contained in a report compiled in 1921 by a special committee appointed by the Council of State to investigate these so-called ‘repressive’ laws. Although then Viceroy Lord Reading (1921–5) had accepted all of the committee’s recommendations and promised to take immediate steps to repeal those laws they had singled out in their report, no progress had been made by the time Patel introduced his bill: see NAI, Foreign/General B/February 1922/no. 82. 132  Legislative Assembly Debates, 3 February 1925, BL, IOR, V/9/66, p. 709. 130 131

Beyond the Frontier173

executive with an alarming set of powers that could be used to deprive people of their fundamental rights. When the Assembly convened several weeks later to discuss the particulars of Patel’s bill, one member declared that ‘the days of Regulations and Ordinances are long past, and they are anachronism in all civilised systems of jurisprudence’.133 But not everyone was so enthusiastic about Patel’s bill, and Diwan Bahadur T. Rangachariar rose to sound a note of caution. Though he was generally supportive of the principles and aims of Patel’s bill, Rangachariar argued that it proposed to strip the government of so many of its executive powers and prerogatives that it would never be passed by the Council of State. Such powers, Rangachariar argued, were sometimes necessary for a government (whether it be British or Swarajist) to protect the lives of their people, and he urged Patel to amend his bill and omit from repeal those laws and powers which were deemed absolutely necessary for the security and ‘defence’ of India.134 One law, in particular, was singled out for exemption from repeal by Rangachariar: the MOA of 1867. When Patel first introduced his bill, Home Member Alexander Muddiman accused him of potentially endangering the lives of British officials by attempting to ‘withdraw such little protection as the law can give to those officers of Government who daily and hourly are risking their lives for the safety of India, in India’s passes in the north, liable at any moment, at any moment I say, to murder’.135  When the Assembly met to discuss the bill several weeks later, Muddiman again rose to defend the necessity of this law, this time by reading the harrowing account of the vicious, murderous assault committed just a few years earlier against the Emmett family in the Peshawar Cantonment. The sheer brutality of the attack stirred the Assembly chamber, and after Muddiman finished reading the stalwart constitutionalist Muhammad Ali Jinnah rose in support of exempting this law from repeal. Although it was against his ‘ideas of justice that any accused person should be tried in the summary manner which this Act provides’, Jinnah conceded that because the MOA was confined to only a few frontier districts, was restricted in its application to ‘fanatics’, and was so necessary for the protection of the British along the frontier, that it should stand ‘on a very different and special footing’.136 According to Jinnah, the MOA represented an acceptable compromise to normal ideas of justice because it was so specific and restricted in its scope that it could hardly be a threat to  Legislative Assembly Debates, 19 March 1925, BL, IOR, V/9/68, p. 2649.  Ibid., pp. 2660, 2664. 135  Legislative Assembly Debates, 3 February 1925, BL, IOR, V/9/66, p. 711. 136  Legislative Assembly Debates, 19 March 1925, BL, IOR, V/9/68, p. 2693. 133 134

174

Frontier Terror and the Murderous Outrages Act of 1867

the security and liberties of ordinary Indians. Unfortunately, this was far from the case. Not only did the slipperiness of the term ‘fanatic’ allow the MOA to be flexibly applied in a number of dubious cases, but the limited geographic application of this law to the frontier became increasingly blurred throughout the twentieth century as British colonial administrators sought new ways of fighting the growing threat posed by violent revolutionary nationalists. In June of 1929, Sir David Petrie, the head of the Indian Intelligence Bureau, warned that British India was standing on the brink of one of the greatest crises in its entire history. As the growing ‘disease’ of nationalism continued to spread across the country, Petrie claimed that the British were quickly losing their ability to contain the revolutionary violence that accompanied it. As a result, they could no longer ensure the safety of not just their own loyal and law-abiding Indian subjects, but that of the local European population who were increasingly becoming the targets of violent attacks motivated by ‘racial hate’.137 If the colonial government had any hope at all of stemming the growing onslaught of political violence and terrorism, Petrie argued, it would need to adopt extraordinary measures that would empower officials to deal with these crimes swiftly, and severely: The only safe, guiding principle I can see is that violence must be at all costs repressed, and prevented from getting anything like a general hold. If it cannot be entirely prevented . . . then such manifestations of it as take place must be dealt with exemplary severity. But they must be dealt with promptly, if Government’s resolve to crush the violence movement is going to be properly realised and to be taken due account of among those concerned. An unflinching determination on the part of Government, as evidenced by strong and immediate steps to deal with violence, will undoubtedly go further than anything else to give pause to those who are about to, or are disposed to, resort to force.138

Although the colonial Statute Book was already replete with an array of draconian legislation that had been enacted to counter the threat posed by Indian revolutionaries, including the Seditious Meetings Act, the 1915 Defence of India Act, and the more recent Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1925, Petrie argued that the government must be prepared to adopt even more stringent measures for the prompt and summary trial of what he referred to as ‘political outrages’. One law in particular seemed to provide an apt model for how to combat this

 Minute on the Present Situation Considered in Relation to Revolutionary Crime and Terrorism, 19 June 1929, NAI, Home/Political/1934/no. 45/VI/34 Poll., paras. 4–8, fp. 16–22. 138  Ibid., para. 10, fp. 25–6. 137

Beyond the Frontier175

growing menace: the MOA of 1867. ‘This may appear to be an extreme step’, Petrie conceded, ‘but it may be one that circumstances may leave us no choice but to adopt’.139 As admittedly extreme as his proposal may have been, Petrie’s Minute was neither the first nor the last time colonial officials toyed with the notion of using the MOA to help fight ‘political crime’ outside of Punjab.140 In 1931, just two years after Petrie’s ominous warning, the Bengal Government desperately petitioned the GOI to grant it the immediate use of certain powers provided under the MOA after a string of politically-motivated murders and attacks had sent shockwaves of panic and public outcry throughout the province.141 Between December 1930 and November 1931, three British officers and two Indian police inspectors were murdered, while attempts were also made on the lives of five other Europeans, including E. Villiers, the President of the European Association, and L.G. Durno, the District Magistrate for Dacca. These attacks not only highlighted the vulnerability of the colonial establishment, but they also incited the same white hot desire for revenge displayed by colonial officials in reaction to ‘fanatical’ attacks along the frontier: There can be little doubt that many members of the services are anxious and agitated about the present situation and its dangers, and feel that all the deterrents possible have not been adopted by Government to protect them and the public from the risk of terrorist outrages. This feeling is becoming more prominent among the police who are in the forefront of the struggle, and it holds the field among the non-official Europeans who are realising more and more the risks which they run not only in their business, as shown by the recent outbreak of attacks with revolvers on mails and remittances, but also as public men, as shown by the attack on Mr. Villiers. Government consider it vitally essentially to do everything possible to restore confidence among the members of their services and to allay the dangerous feeling among Europeans. They also take the view that nothing which may possibly deter people from committing terrorist outrages should be left undone.

 Ibid., para. 11, fp. 27.  In 1909, H.A. Stuart, the Director of Central Criminal Intelligence, suggested applying an almost identical version of the MOA to the entirety of British India in the face of mounting revolutionary violence in Bengal. Stuart’s proposals, however, were quickly abandoned after encountering strong opposition from the GOI: NAI, Home/PoliticalDeposit/March 1910/no. 10. 141  Bengal Government (BG) to the GOI, 7 November 1931, NAI, Home/Political/1932/ no. F-4/65/32 Poll., para. 10, fp. 19–20. For more on the panic caused by the terrorist movement in Bengal, see Kama Maclean, ‘The Art of Panicking Quietly: British Expatriate Responses to “Terrorist Outrages” in India, 1912–33’, in Fischer–Tiné, Anxieties, Fear and Panic, pp. 169–209. 139 140

176

Frontier Terror and the Murderous Outrages Act of 1867

In light of the government’s apparent inability to effectively protect its citizens, and with its own agents now baying for blood, the besieged Bengal authorities were thus forced to look to ‘remedies which at other times would be unthinkable’.142 In December of 1931, after working in close conjunction with the GOI, the Bengal authorities finished a draft bill that would enable the ‘speedier trial of terrorist crime’ on a more permanent basis. Known as  the ‘Terrorist Trials Act, 1931’, this bill empowered local governments to summarily try anyone who, in their ‘opinion’, had committed or was connected to ‘the terrorist movement’.143 Like the MOA, special tribunals could pass sentences of death or transportation for life for cases of murder or even attempted murder without the right to appeal. In order to prevent delays, trials could also proceed while the accused was either incapacitated or otherwise absent.144 However, unlike the MOA, which had a relatively limited application to the NWFP or areas in Punjab specified by the Governor-General, the Terrorist Trials Act would have applied to the whole of British India. Work on the bill eventually stalled, but this did not stop the Bengal authorities from moving forward with other similarly repressive legislation, including the Bengal Criminal Law (Arms and Explosives Act) of 1932 and the Suppression of Terrorist Outrages Act of 1932.145 Compared to certain other proposals that were circulating at the time, these measures were actually quite modest and restrained. Between late September and early October of 1932, for example, the evidently panic-stricken Bengal Government sent two urgent requests to the GOI that it be permitted to try terrorists using courts martial.146 As with the MOA, the Bengal officials justified this drastic measure by arguing that without it there would be no way to prevent the province’s terrified and incensed European population from taking the law into their own hands and inflicting equally brutal extra-­ judicial reprisals. As they put it, ‘unless Government can show they will take further and stronger measures within the law, the loyal element may be moved to take measures themselves without the law’.147  BG to the GOI, 7 November 1931, NAI, Home/Political/1932/no. F-4/65/32 Poll, para. 10, fp. 19–20. 143   A Bill to Make Provision for the Speedier Trial of Terrorist Crime, NAI, Home/ Political/1932/no. F-4/65/32Poll., sections 3–4, fp. 21–2. 144  Ibid., sections 7 and 16, fp. 21–2, 25. 145  Note by C.M. Trivedi, 5 January, ibid., fp. 14; NAI, Home/Political/no. 4/52/32 Poll. 146  BG to the GOI, 24 September 1932, NAI, Home/Political/1932/no. F-4/66/32 Poll.; BG to the GOI, 8 October 1932, ibid. 147  ‘[T]heir nerves’, they wrote, ‘have been subjected to a heavy strain for the last 22 years. There is a definite danger that they may be unable to show complete restraint in the 142

Conclusion177

In 1934, the question of introducing a Bengal version of the MOA was taken up once more; this time as a result of the delays involved in the execution of Surjya Sen, the mastermind behind the Chittagong armoury raid of April 1930. One official wistfully noted how a procedure like the MOA would eliminate the publicity that terrorists like Sen craved,148 while the Deputy Inspector General of the Bengal Criminal Investigative Department concluded that there was very little difference between a ‘religious fanatic’ and a ‘political fanatic’, and thus no reason why the law should not be adopted in Bengal.149 The government ­ultimately decided not to proceed with the law, but officials were nonetheless glad to have a draft law at the ready in case any future emergency should warrant its enactment. The Bengal Government’s repeated deliberations over adapting the MOA in order to fight the growing problem of anti-­colonial terrorist violence is a remarkable example of how this law was much more than an ‘exceptional’ or peripheral piece of colonial legislation. The MOA was such a powerful and important piece of colonial legislation because it not only provided a highly coveted precedent for the summary trial and execution of violent criminals, but also furnished the crucial ideological justification for doing so. Far from the frontier, the powerful, yet highly malleable, legal category of the ‘fanatic’ was adapted into the equally threatening and dangerous ‘terrorist’. These inhuman figures struck terror into the heart of the colonial establishment, and, in turn, prompted some of its most violent responses. The MOA’s influence extended beyond India as well, and colonial authorities as far afield as Aden also used it as a model for fighting their own brand of ‘fanatics’.150 In many ways, then, Punjab was actually a laboratory for certain kinds of executive action and authority that was later adopted by other colonial governments. 4.7 Conclusion In 1866, while officials were debating whether to implement the MOA, Henry Durand registered his strong disapproval for the bill: It would be a universal precedent for all India, and would be regarded as extensible and applicable to other provinces whenever circumstances created event of another murderous outrage occurring’: BG to the GOI, 8 October 1932, ibid., para. 1, n.p. 148  Note by P.C. Bamford, 2 January 1934, NAI, Home/Political/1934/no. 45/VI/34 Poll., fp. 2. 149  Note by the D.I.G., C.I.D., n.d., ibid., fp. 31. 150  See NAI, External Affairs/Near East Mid East/1938/no. 501-N 1938 (Secret).

178

Frontier Terror and the Murderous Outrages Act of 1867

apprehension. In times of panic it might be abused, and in times of peace and good order would not be a very creditable addition to our volume of law, seeing that it is dove-tailing a summary almost military law process with the ordinary Criminal Law. It would not read well among our Statutes.151

Durand was no bleeding heart liberal. In addition to being a strong proponent of incinerating the bodies of dead ‘fanatics’, he was a part of the coterie of officials which was simply content to allow the extrajudicial handling of these cases. Nevertheless, all of his objections proved remarkably prescient. Not only did the MOA permit the sorts of abuses of power he anticipated, but it also set a dangerous precedent for dealing with other forms of anti-colonial resistance that existed well beyond the NWF. The MOA was also certainly no credit to the record of British colonial rule in India, as its Indian critics readily and repeatedly emphasised. In 1936, the INC leader Sundara Satyamurti introduced a bill into the Legislative Assembly similar to Patel’s rejected repressive laws repealing bill from 1925. Like Patel, Satyamurti argued that these laws impinged on the fundamental rights and freedoms of Indian citizens, and claimed that it was ‘high time that these laws [were] removed from the Statute Book’.152 In a record-long speech of over six hours, Satyamurti provided a methodical, yet impassioned denunciation of each of these laws. The ‘Moplah Act’, he claimed, was an example of ‘statutory draftsmanship of which even Hitler in his persecution of the Jews must be ashamed’. Afterwards, he argued that the MOA was even worse since it was not confined to a single community and could be used to persecute the entire population.153 Satyamurti’s Repressive Laws Repealing and Amending Bill was never adopted by the Assembly, and despite his best efforts after repeated delays over the next several years, it was still languishing in legislative purgatory.154 During his speech in the Assembly, Satyamurti lamented how, ‘Centuries pass, but nothing happens in the way of the repeal of these Acts’. ‘The Government of India Act, 1919’, he continued, ‘the Government of India Act, 1935, Indian Law Members, Indian Commerce Members even Indian Governors come, but these wretched Acts go on’.155 Satyamurti’s

  Note by H.M.D., 12 September 1866, NAI, Foreign/Judicial A/March 1867/nos. 12–14, p. 4. 152  ‘A Bill to Repeal and Amend Certain Repressive Laws’: Statement of Objects and Reasons, NAI, Home/Political/1935/nos. 24/6, fp. 50. 153  Legislative Assembly Debates, 9–23 April 1936, vol. 5 (New Delhi: GOI Press, 1936), pp. 3815, 3817. 154  ‘“Present Assembly is the Best”: Mr. Satyamurthy’s Broadcast’, The Times of India, 7 July 1938, p. 3. 155  Legislative Assembly Debates, 9–23 April 1936, p. 3817. 151

Conclusion179

despair over the apparent longevity and tenacity of these repressive colonial laws seems particularly relevant when we consider the contemporary postcolonial context, where many of these same laws have actually been processed into modern forms of statecraft. While recent protests and debates in India over the sedition charges brought against certain members of Jawaharlal Nehru University and their supporters have raised renewed questions about the prescripted limits of the notorious Section 124-A of the Indian Penal Code, the FATA region of Pakistan continues to be administered by a highly exceptional legal-politico regime where laws like the Frontier Crimes Regulation and the MOA are still part of the arsenal of state power.156 In the latter case, it is perhaps somewhat unsurprising that a colonial-era law conceived to fight against the threat of ‘fanaticism’ would continue to find uses today in a region that has become one of the front lines in the so-called ‘War on Terror’. Just as the loosely defined category of the frontier ‘fanatic’ found ready comparisons to the violent revolutionary nationalists of the 1920s and 1930s, so does the contemporary image of the global ‘terrorist’ continue to be suffused with, and borrow, many of these same tropes.157 Much like the ghazis of the nineteenth century, the image of the modern-day ‘terrorist’ is one that is intimately associated with religious radicalism, bigotry, backwardness, and brutal violence. They are the quintessential ‘other’ – an existentially threatening and dangerous individual who stands entirely outside all acceptable limits set by society – and inspire the same sense and fear and revulsion the British felt towards the ghazis of the NWF. But if there is perhaps one important lesson that can be gleaned from the history of British attempts to deal with problem of ‘fanaticism’ along the NWF and elsewhere in India, it is that authoritarian crackdowns and draconian legislation borne from panic and fear rarely seem to have been effective measures in suppressing what were often sophisticated and complex acts of anti-colonial resistance. Though laws like the Moplah Act and the MOA may have made British administrators sleep a little easier at night, they did little to address the underlying economic, political, and social issues that motivated disaffected individuals to take up the mantle of religion or revolutionary nationalism in order to fight against the state. Instead, what these laws do reveal is how the systemic anxieties that underpinned colonial power were mobilised   As recently as 2001 the 1901 Murderous Outrages Regulation was amended and renewed by the Pakistani government: ‘The Punjab Murderous Outrages Act, 1867’, The Commonwealth Legal Information Institute. Accessed 15 March 2016: www.commonlii .org/pk/legis/pj/consol_act/pmoa1867302/. See also Zulfiqar Ali, ‘FATA: In a Black Box’, Dawn, 9 August 2015. Accessed 15 March 2016: www.dawn.com/news/1198967. 157  Condos, ‘“Fanaticism” and the Politics of Resistance’. 156

180

Frontier Terror and the Murderous Outrages Act of 1867

and translated into deadly forms of executive prerogative in the name of preserving the security of the regime. Indeed, as we shall see in the following chapter, similar fears about the threat posed by the revolutionary Ghadar movement in Punjab during the First World led to the promulgation of the deeply controversial 1915 Defence of India Act – a law whose indefinite extension following the War would incite widespread protests, culminating in the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre of 1919.

5

Imperial Recruiting and Imperial Anxieties, 1870–1920

Let thy hair grow long and talk Punjabi . . . that is all that makes a Sikh. Rudyard Kipling, Kim1

5.1 Introduction By the end of the Fist World War, British India was at the centre of a vast, far-flung empire, stretching from Sumatra and Malacca in the east, to the Persian Gulf and Iraq in the west. This so-called ‘Empire of the Raj’ was built on Indian expertise, capital, labour, and of course, military power.2 As the most readily-available and relatively inexpensive source of ­coercive manpower, the Indian armed forces had been frequently called upon to help subjugate and police Britain’s expanding territorial possessions since the time of the Company. Indeed, by the late nineteenth century, Indian soldiers and policemen were deployed so extensively overseas that it had become a ‘commonplace’ part of British imperial strategic thinking.3 To date, most scholarly work on this subject has focussed on two main themes: the strategic contributions of the Indian Army to imperial defence and policing, and the accompanying political, social, economic, and cultural impact that this had on both Indian and local communities.4 This chapter, however, explores a relatively overlooked aspect of this question: namely, how the movement of Indian and policemen overseas  Rudyard Kipling, Kim (1901; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 33.  See Robert J. Blyth, The Empire of the Raj: India, Eastern Africa and the Middle East, 1858–1947 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). 3  Thomas R. Metcalf, Imperial Connections: India and the Indian Ocean Arena, 1860–1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), p. 69. 4  See Karl Hack, ‘Imperialism and Decolonisation in Asia: Colonial Forces and British World Power’, in Karl Hack and Tobias Rettig (eds.), Colonial Armies in Asia (London & New York: Routledge, 2006), pp. 239–65; Tony Ballantyne, Between Colonialism and Diaspora: Sikh Cultural Formations in an Imperial World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006); Darshan Singh Tatla, The Sikh Diaspora: the Search for Statehood (London: UCL Press, 1999). 1 2

181

182

Imperial Recruiting and Imperial Anxieties, 1870–1920

became a source of chronic malaise and insecurity for the British imperial establishment. Although the widespread use of Indians undoubtedly contributed greatly towards imperial defence, the increasing use of Indian soldiers and policemen overseas also created new challenges and problems for both the GOI as well as the wider empire. By the 1880s, with the renewed spectre of a Russian invasion via the NWF frontier looming in the minds of Indian administrators, acute fears about manpower shortages sapping the strength of the Indian Army became widespread.5 As a result, officials began to view the employment of Indians outside of India with increasing trepidation. The sheer popularity of Punjabis, especially Sikhs, in overseas police and military forces was particularly worrisome, since these were not only the most highly coveted classes within the Indian Army, but they were also increasingly the most overburdened in terms of recruitment. At the beginning of the twentieth century, these concerns were compounded by even greater fears about Indians being actively recruited by Britain’s imperial rivals throughout Southeast Asia. Faced with these mounting concerns, the GOI sought to develop effective methods of regulating and controlling the movement of its martial subjects. Its ability to do so, however, was ultimately constrained by the wider strategic priorities of an empire that was deeply reliant upon Indian and Punjabi coercive manpower. During the First World War, this same dependence was actively turned against the British as Ghadar revolutionaries from North America sought to import sedition and rebellion back into India using the same networks that had once helped protect the empire. Ghadar’s attempts to subvert the loyalty of Indian soldiers and incite a general uprising in Punjab sent a wave of panic through the colonial administration in India, prompting the creation of 1915 Defence of India Act and the most brutal authoritarian crackdown yet seen in the twentieth century. Imperial Britain’s dependence on India and Punjab for its security needs thus ironically actually became the source of ­considerable anxiety and one of its potentially greatest threats. 5.2

Imperial Martial Races, Recruitment, and the Sikh ‘Craze’

As we have already seen briefly in Chapter 2, in the aftermath of the Rebellion of 1857 British military officials in India increasingly preferred to recruit from a select set of classes known as the ‘martial races’.

 Omissi, The Sepoy and the Raj, pp. 10–12.

5

Imperial Martial Races, Recruitment, and the Sikh ‘Craze’183

According to conventional accounts, the idea that certain groups of Indians made for inherently superior soldiers and policemen was based on a combination of pseudo-scientific racial ideologies, and romanticised notions of martial masculinity.6 More recently, however, other scholars have pointed out that martial races theory was never as internally coherent, stable, or hegemonic as these accounts, and indeed popular imagination, would have us believe. Not only were the ‘ideal’ types of recruits posited in official recruiting manuals often difficult to locate, but the very same definitions of ‘martialness’ contained therein were contested and prone to change.7 This may help explain why the British found it so difficult to identify martial races outside of India that could be recruited locally within their newfound colonial possessions across Africa and Asia. Although some groups – such as the Nandi of Kenya who were widely recruited into the King’s African Rifles – seemed to satisfy British notions of martialness, most other African, Malay, and Chinese groups they encountered did not as readily conform to conventional visions of what it meant to be a martial race.8 Finding few reliable local populations from whom they could recruit, imperial officials increasingly turned to the proven track record of Indian soldiers and policemen in order to provide them with the coercive ­manpower necessary to conquer, defend, and police their non-Indian colonies. Thus, despite the dubiousness and contested nature of martial races theory, it nonetheless retained a remarkable amount of ideological purchase outside the subcontinent. In 1902, an estimated 1,700 ‘natives of Northern India’ were serving in overseas police forces. This included a force of 300 in the Straits Settlements, 900 in the Federated Malay States, and 350 and 150 in Hong Kong and Shanghai, respectively.9 Indians were also employed as police in British North Borneo, Siam, Johore, the Chinese Treaty Ports of Canton and Tientsin, and reportedly even in the Bangkok police force. The bulk of these Indian forces were recruited from Punjab, and Sikhs in particular, became one of the most

 Ibid.; Streets, Martial Races.  Singh, ‘“Finding Those Men with Guts”’; Rand and Wagner, ‘Recruiting the “Martial Races”’. 8  Metcalf, Imperial Connections, pp. 76–7. In May of 1858, for example, Thomas Dunman, the Commissioner of police for Singapore, complained about the impossibility of finding ‘honest’ men for police work in Singapore. According to Dunman, all the local Chinese were ‘addicted to gambling and opium smoking’, and were supposedly under the nefarious influence of Chinese secret societies: Dunman to the SSG, 5 May 1858, BL, IOR, L/MIL/7/14764. 9  Note by Capt. M. Ray, 11 February 1902, NAI, Military B/April 1903/nos. 1512–16. 6 7

184

Imperial Recruiting and Imperial Anxieties, 1870–1920

sought after groups for military and police service outside of India.10 The Malay States Guides, a force of 600 strong, for example, was composed mainly of Sikhs, but included some Pashtuns and Punjabi Muslims as well. Police forces in the Straits Settlements, Hong Kong, and Shanghai, on the other hand, were reported to be composed ‘almost entirely of Sikhs’.11 Sikhism, as Tony Ballantyne points out, has always been a highly mobile religious, cultural, and political movement, even in pre-colonial times.12 After the annexation of Punjab in 1849, Sikh mobility was accelerated even further by its incorporation into the rapidly expanding global networks of the British imperial world, opening up new opportunities and challenges for this community. Imperial service with Britain’s colonial armies and police forces, for example, not only provided much-needed relief from growing population pressure at home by allowing young men to travel and live overseas, but also contributed significantly to the growing economic prosperity of Punjab during this period.13 Travel abroad also opened up new opportunities for the reconfiguration of martial Sikh identities within these migrant societies. The exclusive recruiting practices of colonial armies and police forces, for instance, tended to reify certain aspects of Sikh tradition and identity by placing greater emphasis on the need for Sikh soldiers and police to conform to well-known images and practices associated with Sikhism. Sikhs were strongly encouraged to cultivate a Tat Khalsa (‘true Khalsa’) identity by displaying the external accoutrements of the panj kakkar, the five obligatory accoutrements of Khalsa Sikhs according to the teachings of Guru Gobind Singh.14 At the same time, however, this reification of Sikh identity also led to its ­seemingly paradoxical democratisation in other respects. Foreign governments were largely unaware of the nuanced distinctions within martial races theory that meant not all classes of Sikhs were considered desirable recruits.15 As a result, certain classes of Sikhs who were not normally considered for military service back home in India, notably low-caste  This is not to say that other martial races – Punjabi Muslims, Pashtuns, or even certain non-Punjabis – are unimportant to this story. However, as the archetypal martial race, Sikhs were often singled out in these endeavours and debates surrounding the dangers of overseas recruiting. For a more in-depth examination of the history of other Indian groups who served overseas, see Metcalf, Imperial Connections. 11  Note by Capt. M. Ray, 11 February 1902, NAI, Military B/April 1903/nos. 1512–16. 12  Ballantyne, Between Colonialism and Diaspora, p. ix. 13  Tatla, Sikh Diaspora, p. 44; Metcalf, Imperial Connections, pp. 219–20. 14  These included the kaccha (breeches), kangha (wooden comb), kara (steel bracelet), kesh (uncut hair), and the kirpan (sword or dagger). See Ballantyne, Between Colonialism and Diaspora, p. 66; also, Oberoi, The Construction of Religious Boundaries. 15  Singh, ‘“Finding Those Men with Guts”’, pp. 116–17. 10

A Haphazard Affair: Regulating Indian Foreign Recruitment185

Mazhbi Sikhs, were given new opportunities for service abroad. Even non-Sikhs began to adopt the symbols of Sikhism in a pragmatic bid to obtain service for themselves. As Metcalf has observed, the term ‘Sikh’ became ‘little more than a floating signifier indicating martial ability’, meaning that anyone with the appropriate physique and who wore a ­turban could become a ‘Sikh’.16 Pervasive, yet flexible, Sikh martial credentials opened up a new range of possibilities for those who possessed (or could manufacture) them. In the ever-expanding world of migration and empire-building t­hroughout the Indian Ocean in the late nineteenth and early t­wentieth centuries, a Sikh martial identity afforded mobility and the ­opportunity for lucrative employment. It was the sheer popularity of Sikhs – and indeed other Punjabi martial races – in these overseas endeavours, however, that u ­ ltimately became so deeply problematic for the GOI. As Britain’s non-Indian colonial governments increasingly began to insist that Sikhs alone could satisfy their security needs, military officials in India began to worry that this insatiable Sikh ‘craze’ was sapping the strength of the Indian Army. Attempts to regulate the overseas employment of Sikhs and other martial races, as we shall see in the following section, were extremely difficult. Not only was the GOI often reluctant to place limits on its contributions to the defence of the wider empire, but much of its recruitment took place through unofficial channels that could not be ­easily monitored or controlled. In a way, colonial authorities in India unwittingly became victims of their own success in propagating the idea of warrior Sikhs, and the idea martial races more generally. Ideas and practices that were initially used as tools of colonial control in order to regulate which classes of Indians were considered loyal and reliable began slipping through the fingers of imperial authorities when they moved outside of India. Martial races theory, therefore, was not the unqualified boon to imperial defence as is often assumed, and actually created the potential for new forms of transgression and subversion of imperial authority. 5.3

A Haphazard Affair: Regulating Indian Foreign Recruitment

In late January of 1871, the Inspector General of Police for Punjab, G. Hutchinson, forwarded an unsettling report to the Punjab Government that a number of Namdhari Sikhs were seeking employment as soldiers

 Metcalf, Imperial Connections, p. 111.

16

186

Imperial Recruiting and Imperial Anxieties, 1870–1920

with the native states of Kashmir and Nepal. According to Hutchinson, the Maharajah of Kashmir, Ranbir Singh, had begun raising a Namdhari regiment in 1869, shortly after a delegation sent by the Namdhari religious leader, Ram Singh, had petitioned the ruler to enlist his followers. By early 1870, around 150 Namdharis had already been recruited, though this number included several old men and young boys. Although the Namdharis were taught basic drill, they lacked proper uniforms and were very poorly equipped. While a few were given firearms and swords, the vast majority were armed only with lathis (bamboo sticks).17 Discipline and morale among the men was low, discontent widespread, and many ended up deserting. When news reached the already displeased Maharajah that Namdhari disciples had been responsible for the shocking murders of several Muslim butchers in Amritsar and Ludhiana in June and July of 1871, this was the final straw. The Maharajah promptly disbanded the entire regiment, and expelled all Namdharis from his territory.18 As groups of these disbanded Namdharis began to make their way back into British territory in late September and early October 1871, colonial officials began to investigate the rumours about Namdharis seeking service with the Nepalese army. Inquiries by the British Resident in Nepal, R.C. Lawrence, revealed that Ram Singh had, indeed, sent a delegation of his followers to Prime Minister Jung Bahadur Rana in the winter of 1870 under the pretense of presenting some water buffaloes as a gift. Fortunately for the British, they had been turned away because it was against the policy of the Durbar to recruit foreigners, except as drill instructors or artificers in powder magazines.19 While the abortive attempt by the Namdharis to obtain military service in the ranks of these independent Indian states may initially seem like little more than a curious historical footnote, this brief incident actually vividly encapsulates many of the challenges and problems that foreign recruiting posed to the colonial state in India for much of the nineteenth century. Up until the 1890s, the enlistment of Punjabi soldiers and police for service outside of British India was a surprisingly unregulated, haphazard affair. Foreign powers, including Indian princely states, other British colonial governments, and even other European states, were able to enlist men with relative impunity due to the fact that such recruitment tended to operate almost entirely outside the purview of both the Punjab

 Hutchinson to the PG, 30 January 1871, NAI, Foreign/Political A/April 1871, nos. 52–7, paras. 2–7. 18  Confidential Police Report for the Week Ending 7 October 1871, Gujranwala District, NAI, Foreign/Political A/February 1872, nos. 39–49, para. 2, p. 4. 19  Lawrence to the GOI, 22 November 1871, ibid., paras. 1, 5, p. 1. 17

A Haphazard Affair: Regulating Indian Foreign Recruitment187

Government and the GOI. As the GOI remarked with some concern following the Namdhari incident, the local Punjab police had not become aware of the enlistments ‘till some time had elapsed’.20 Although the Punjab Government subsequently issued strict orders that all recruiting parties thereafter should be closely monitored, this was much easier said than done.21 The recruitment of the Namdharis had operated entirely through unofficial channels, relying instead on informal religious and familial networks.22 As G. McAndrew, the officiating Inspector-General of police, glumly pointed out in November of 1871: Foreign Princes can easily enlist at present, without drawing attention to their action by securing the services of one or two recruits in a number of separate villages and telling them to find their own way singly to their regiment. The only way to ensure information in such cases would be to make the nearest male relative in the family and lumberdars of the village responsible for reporting the occurrence of such enrolments. The Police are too few and too sparsely scattered to see themselves anything under open enrolment of some numbers.23

Calls for enlistment could therefore be easily be passed by word of mouth between members of the same religious or kinship groups, allowing news to spread quickly and away from the prying ears of colonial officials. In the absence of official oversight, British authorities had little to no control over the classes of men who were being recruited in these endeavours. The Namdhari incident, for example, demonstrates how enterprising groups who were not normally enlisted within the Indian Army were able to capitalise on the martial reputation of Sikhs in order to obtain service with foreign powers who were usually less discerning than their counterparts in British India.24 In this case, colonial officials were particularly alarmed by the fact that an already violent and revolutionary group was seeking formal military training that could be used against the British colonial state.25 Although it is not clear whether any of these  GOI to the PG, 2 November 1871, ibid., para. 1, p. 6.  PG to the GOI, 8 December 1871, ibid., para. 2, p. 7. 22  Aside from the fact that all the recruits belonged to the same religious sect, the Maharajah had also ordered his recruiters ‘to get men of fine physique and good family, his idea being that by having men of good family he could, through their influence, get their relatives in like manner to enlist for his service’: Copy of demi-official letter from Charles Girdlestone, 5 October 1871, ibid., para. 1, p. 2. 23  McAndrew to the PG, 9 November 1871, ibid., para. 7, p. 8. 24  One visiting British officer to the Maharajah’s court reportedly expressed surprise that he would employ men whom the British would not normally take into the ranks of their armed forces: Copy of demi-official letter from Charles Girdlestone, 5 October 1871, ibid., para. 1, pp. 2–3. 25  Hutchinson to the PG, 30 January 1871, NAI, Foreign/Political A/April 1871, nos. 52–7, para. 13; Memorandum by Colonel McAndrew, 13 October 1871, NAI, Foreign/ Political A/February 1872, nos. 39–49, para. 4, p. 6; Confidential Police Report for the 20 21

188

Imperial Recruiting and Imperial Anxieties, 1870–1920

disbanded Namdharis participated in the subsequent ‘Kooka outbreak’ of 1872, officials remained deeply suspicious that this had been part of a sinister and carefully orchestrated plot on the part of Ram Singh and the leaders of Kashmir and Nepal to destabilise and overthrow British rule.26 But whereas the enlistment of Namdharis was troubling because of their extreme undesirability as recruits, British officials were predominantly worried that their best soldier classes would be taken without their consent by these foreign recruiters. As the Punjab Government remarked shortly after the Namdhari incident, ‘The Punjab will always be, from the character of the class inhabiting it, the favourite recruiting field for all neighbouring subordinate States, and it is very desirable that the Government should be in a position to know exactly the number of recruits drawn from the province and the States in which they have undertaken to serve.’27 McAndrew similarly noted that ‘Enlisting parties frequently make the Punjab a field for their operations’.28 According to the Punjab authorities, the only way of preventing these types of undesirable enlistments would be to enact special regulatory legislation. However, after a brief discussion in the Foreign Department, government officials decided to let the matter rest.29 It would take another similar incident nearly two years later to finally convince the GOI about the need to regulate the recruitment of its Indian soldiers by foreign powers. In 1873, Captain T.C.S. Speedy, a former lieutenant in the 10th Punjab Regiment, had enlisted 200 men – mostly Sikhs and Pashtuns – for service under the Raja of Larut without the knowledge or consent of government authorities.30 The GOI was also shocked to learn that because Speedy had not technically violated any laws, they were powerless to intervene.31 The absurdity of the government’s position in this matter was pointed out quite poignantly by the Bengal secretary, A. Mackenzie. ‘A coolie to till the land’, he wrote, ‘may not be taken without very special precautions. But a soldier may be taken without Week Ending 7 October 1871, Gujranwala District, NAI, Foreign/Political A/February 1872, nos. 39–49, para. 6, p. 5.  PG to the GOI, 22 February 1872, NAI, Home/Judicial A/June 1872/nos. 107–11, para. 7. 27  PG to the GOI, 8 December 1871, NAI, Foreign/Political A/February 1872, nos. 39–49, para. 3, p. 7. 28  McAndrew to the PG, 9 November 1871, NAI, Foreign/Political A/February 1872, nos.  39–49, para. 5, p. 7. 29  See Note by C.U.A., 19 December 1871, ibid.; Note by J.F.S., 29 December 1871, ibid. 30  Speedy to the Commissioner of Police, Calcutta, 16 September 1873, NAI, Legislative A/February 1874, nos. 85–96, no. 86, para. 1, p. 1. 31  According to the Advocate-General, G.C. Paul, Speedy’s actions had not violated the provisions of either the Penal Code, the Indian Emigration Act of 1871, or the Foreign Enlistment Act of 1870: GOI to the BG, 24 September 1873, ibid., no. 86, para. 1, p. 2. 26

A Haphazard Affair: Regulating Indian Foreign Recruitment189

any precautions whatever’.32 The striking inability of government authorities to intervene in both the Namdhari and the Speedy incidents finally convinced officials that formal measures were needed, and in 1874 the GOI passed the Foreign Recruiting Act (Act IV of 1874). This was an important law, in that it marked the first time that the GOI attempted to formally regulate the enlistment of Indians for foreign military or police service. The law granted the GOI summary powers to decide on all matters relating to this type of recruitment, allowing the Governor-General to permit or restrict recruitment at his own personal discretion.33 Although this new law finally gave Indian officials the power to protect their recruiting grounds and the ability to prosecute offenders who violated their rules, they displayed a peculiarly marked and consistent hesitation to do so.34 For example, in 1884, Captain R.S.F. Walker of the Perak Police was caught recruiting a number of Punjabis at the behest of the Straits Settlements without the consent or knowledge of the GOI.35 Although the Act provided the GOI with the clear legal right to deny Walker from departing India with his men, he was eventually ­permitted to leave with his recruits.36 In another similar incident in 1891, officials again hesitated to invoke their right to enforce the provisions of the Act. In this case, the commanding officer of the Royal Artillery in China, Colonel G.B. Macdowell, had sent a Subedar named Surmukh Singh to recruit Sikhs and Muslims for service in Hong Kong (once again without the consent or knowledge of the GOI).37 Although the Military Department was quite irritated by this breach of protocol, the GOI simply took it upon itself to remind the Hong Kong government that ‘no more direct enlistments can be allowed’ and that they should, in future, ‘inform the Government of India by telegraph should any more gunners be required’.38 Indian officials soon realised that repeated warnings  BG to the GOI, 29 September, 1873, ibid., para. 2, p. 1.  A Bill to Control Recruiting in British India for the service of Foreign States, Appendix EE, ibid., p. 13. 34  Violators of the Act faced imprisonment for up to seven years, or could be fined up to any amount, as deemed fit by the court. 35  Once again, the local Punjab authorities were either oblivious, or at best indifferent, to Walker’s actions. As the Inspector-General of police explained, ‘as far as I am aware, there was nothing illegal in his taking recruits for his force’: Inspector-General to the PG, 26 February 1884, NAI, Military A/June 1884/nos. 1455–6, no. 1455, para. 3, p. 1. 36  They did, however, issue a formal warning to the Straits Government that all future requests for men should be made formally to the GOI, and through proper channels: GOI to the SSG, 6 June 1884, NAI, Foreign/A Pol. I/June 1884/no. 178, para. 1, p. 1. 37  Adjutant-General to the GOI, 13 November 1891, NAI, Military B/July 1892/nos. 2401–561, no. 2458, para. 1, p. 84. 38  GOI to the General Officer Commanding in China and Hong Kong, 26 November 1891, ibid., no. 2465, para. 3, p. 105. The GOI also petitioned the War Office to provide 32 33

190

Imperial Recruiting and Imperial Anxieties, 1870–1920

against those who violated their rules were having little impact in curbing what was becoming an increasingly widespread practice. In June of 1892, in a bid to put a stop to this problem once and for all, the GOI petitioned the Secretary of State for India, Richard Cross, to allow them the authority to directly oversee all future imperial recruiting operations performed in India. Under the proposed system, the GOI would use its own recruiting depots to facilitate and manage the enlistment process for all Indian soldiers travelling overseas as if they were regular units within the Indian Army. Each colonial government outside of India seeking new recruits would still need to send its own ‘working parties’ to India, but they would now need to liaise with and work directly under the orders of an Indian district recruiting officer.39 The obvious advantage of integrating imperial recruitment with the local system of district recruiting officers was that Indian officials could now exercise much tighter control over which classes of Indians were recruited for overseas service. This system, it was assumed, would prevent the siphoning off of India’s premier martial classes, and would enable a greater balance to be struck between colonial forces and the Indian Army. Concerns about the so-called ‘drain’ on India’s recruiting grounds due to foreign recruitment had been a cause of growing alarm within military circles since the early 1880s. Many officials worried that supplying other colonial forces with crack recruits from India’s premier martial classes was weakening the effectiveness of the Indian Army at a time when it was vital to preserve its strength in order to repel a potential invasion from the Russians.40 As one official put it in October of 1893, it would be ‘suicidal to admit further demands from Africa and elsewhere on our exhausted recruiting grounds’, since it was now ‘absolutely impossible to obtain Sikhs and Punjabi Muhammadans of the old class’ for the Indian Army’s own needs.41 Some hoped it might be possible to alleviate this problem by simply limiting the number of men recruited from India’s ‘premier’ martial classes, and by opening up such foreign recruitment to a wider segment of the Indian population. Sikhs, in particular, were believed to be a highly threatened class that needed to be protected. According to one article in the Civil and Military Gazette, the seemingly insatiable ‘ambition of the clearer instructions to the military authorities in all of Britain’s colonies in order to reduce the amount of confusion over these regulations: Extract of letter no. 241 from the GOI, 9 December 1891, ibid., no. 2474, p. 116. 39  GOI to Cross, 21 June 1892, BL, IOR, L/MIL/7/14782, coll. 334/20. 40  Minutes and Notes, dated 1883–91 by Field Marshal Earl Frederick Roberts, BL, IOR, Mss/Eur/D/734; also Omissi, The Sepoy and the Raj, pp. 10–12. 41  Note by W.G., 4 October 1893, NAI, Foreign/Secret E/January 1894/nos. 480–6.

A Haphazard Affair: Regulating Indian Foreign Recruitment191

Colonial Governments in Africa, the Straits and elsewhere to indent on India for Sikhs, and nothing but Sikhs’ represented a dangerous ‘fad’ that had to be curtailed. ‘If they are to be permitted to enlist men in the Punjab at all rather than in the much more populous recruiting fields of Hindustan’, the article continued, ‘the concession should at least be accompanied by the proviso that their craze for Sikhs cannot be gratified’.42 Punjabi Muslims and Dogras, the article insisted, were ‘every bit as good a soldier as the Sikhs’, and colonial governments, it was argued, should be ‘rigorously prohibited from enlisting any Sikhs at all’.43 In February of 1896, the GOI even went so far as to suggest to the Secretary of State for India that India cease to provide soldiers altogether, and that the colonies should raise their own indigenously recruited corps in order to relieve the ‘drain on the best classes of our Native soldiers’.44 These attempts to curtail the wholesale provision of Indians for employment with colonial forces throughout the empire, however, were greatly constrained by the political pressure exerted by these colonial governments, who argued vehemently against the idea of raising local corps using their own ‘undesirable’ populations.45 As one of the central hubs of an expanding empire, India could not simply play its own game, and, time and time again, the GOI found itself having to concede to the demands of the wider empire.46 In addition to the political lobbying, Britain’s non-Indian colonies exerted a considerable amount of economic pressure that made it difficult for the GOI to control foreign recruiting. Salaries offered by foreign services often far exceeded those of the Indian Army, and thus encouraged shrewd individuals to spurn service in India and seek employment  ‘The New Indian Regiments’, Civil and Military Gazette, 26 January 1902, p. 3.  Ibid. 44  GOI to Hamilton, 5 February 1896, NAI, Military A/February 1896/nos. 2501–67, no. 2566, para. 5, p. 22. 45  In November of 1894, Henry Hamilton Johnston requested 200 Sikhs to replace men whose terms of service had recently expired in British Central Africa. Although the GOI had emphatically stated the year before that they would be unable to provide any additional Sikhs to Central Africa due to manpower shortages, Johnston waged an aggressive letter-writing campaign to the Foreign Secretary, arguing that the security of the colony would be compromised without the requested relief force. Unless he was granted the new men, or extensions were applied to the current troops, he argued, it would ‘be necessary to make arrangements for recruiting Sikhs on our own behalf’: Johnston to the Earl of Kimberley, 11 November 1894, NAI, Military A/May 1895/nos. 701–12, no. 706, paras. 2–3, p. 7. As a result, the GOI was induced to ‘waive its previous objections to sending Sikh soldiers to Central Africa’ due to the ‘Imperial interests involved’, and ordered the Military Department and CINC to make the necessary preparations to send over the requested Sikhs: GOI to the Adjutant-General, 19 February 1895, NAI, Military A/May 1895/nos. 701–12, no. 710, para. 2, p. 15. 46  Metcalf, Imperial Connections, p. 125. 42 43

192

Imperial Recruiting and Imperial Anxieties, 1870–1920

abroad. As one Military Department official despaired in December of 1894, ‘It is well known that excellent recruits can be obtained in any number in the Punjab for service out of India, as the pay and conditions of service are so much better in nearly every case than in our own native army, and, until we increase the pay of the sepoy, I fancy any rules or regulations that may be framed will have but little effect in stopping the outward flow of our best material’.47 Two years later, Captain F.G.R. Ostrehan similarly remarked how the Jats of the Rohtak and Delhi districts no longer wished to enlist at all for service in India. Although these areas had once been ‘prolific recruiting grounds’, he claimed, the local population were now eager to enlist only in foreign artillery regiments due to the substantially higher salaries they could receive.48 Because of the sheer size of the Indian Army, the GOI simply could not afford to offer such generous salaries as Britain’s other colonies.49 ‘The repeated offers of liberal terms for service abroad made to our Indian soldiers’, they complained to the Secretary of State for India, ‘cannot fail to excite in them invidious comparisons between those terms and the rates of pay which the Government of India is able to offer’.50 The inability of the GOI to effectively regulate the recruitment of its premier martial classes points to a number of glaring and important weaknesses within the machinery of colonial governance. For one thing, it shows an often surprising degree of administrative apathy and incompetence at the local level. The apparent laxity and disinterest of the Punjab police allowed foreign recruiters to operate largely unhindered and unmonitored. And even when officials did take an interest in keeping track of these sorts of activities, it was often difficult to do so because of the informal methods that were employed by recruiters. Since calls for recruits were usually spread by word of mouth from one village to the next, it often only became apparent that recruitment operations were going on once they were nearly finished and all the men were collected into one central location.51 The so-called ‘craze’ for Punjabi and Sikh soldiers and policemen, moreover, created new opportunities for ­enterprising Indians who were willing to travel overseas and serve throughout Britain’s empire. As Indians came to realise that they could  Note by A.E.J., 20 December 1894, NAI, Military B/June 1895/nos. 38–41.  Ostrehan to the Deputy Adjutant-General, Bengal, 23 December 1896, BL, IOR, L/ MIL/7/14782, coll. 334/20. 49  Note by B.D., 29 September 1893, NAI, Foreign/Secret E/January 1894/nos. 480–6. 50  GOI to Hamilton, 5 February 1896, NAI, Military A/February 1896/nos. 2501–67, no. 2566, para. 5, p. 22. 51  McAndrew to the PG, 9 November 1871, NAI, Foreign/Political A/February 1872/nos. 39–49, no. 44, para. 7, p. 8. 47 48

Imperial Rivalries and Imperial Anxieties193

obtain s­ alaries that far exceeded those of the Indian Army, some began to spurn service in India and seek their fortunes abroad. This tended to have a domino effect, since those who were successful often brought word back to their families and villages, inspiring others to follow in their footsteps. 5.4

Imperial Rivalries and Imperial Anxieties

By the turn of the twentieth century, endemic fears about the purported ‘drain’ on India’s armies by overseas service were compounded by an even greater perceived threat to British imperial interests. Although attempts by the GOI to regulate overseas recruitment had worked to place limitations on parties seeking to enlist soldiers and policemen directly from India, few provisions were made to prevent Indians from emigrating and seeking employment on their own accord. As increasing numbers of Indians began to migrate to the colonies in search of military and police work, local police and military forces became swamped by applicants and were soon unable to absorb the sheer number of Indians applying for such work. As a result, those Indians who could not find work within Britain’s saturated imperial forces reportedly began to seek employment among rival European powers in the region. By 1902, there were reports of Indians taking service with the French in Tonkin, the Germans in Kiautschou, the Dutch in Sumatra, and even the Russians in Manchuria and Port Arthur.52 In 1894, the Government of the Straits Settlements reported that an increasing number of recently-arrived Indians, mostly Sikhs, were applying for certificates that would allow them to emigrate to Dutch Sumatra. Between 1892 and 1894, a total of 630 of such certificates were granted in Singapore and Penang, not including the ‘large number’ of Sikhs who were refused such certificates.53 Immigration authorities soon became suspicious of the unusually high number of Sikhs travelling to Sumatra, many of whom were believed to be applying for certificates under false pretences. In September of 1894, the Straits Immigration Officer reported that many of the reasons given by applicants were ‘clearly untrue’, and that he believed many applicants were secretly seeking employment with

 Metcalf, Imperial Connections, p. 128.  SSG to the GOI, 22 April 1895, BL, IOR, L/PJ/6/399, file 1024. According to the Straits Immigration Officer, no less than 117 such certificates had been granted to Sikhs in 1894 alone: Indian Immigration Agent, to the SSG, 13 September 1894, NAI, Military B/June 1895/nos. 38–41, no. 39, para. 3.

52 53

194

Imperial Recruiting and Imperial Anxieties, 1870–1920

the Dutch colonial armed forces.54 According to another official, ‘there is no doubt that the intention of the applicants has been not to engage in agricultural work, but to obtain employment as police or watchmen, for which purpose they also emigrate to Borneo and Siam’.55 Military officials despaired that Indians enlisting with the Dutch would not only exacerbate the pressure placed on the Indian Army’s already strained recruiting grounds, but would also set a dangerous precedent. As one official noted, ‘it would be impolitic to permit any classes from this country (Sikhs or others) to take service in the civil or military forces of another nation – if they go to Sumatra and Borneo, they can find their way to Annam and Tonquin and take service with the French’.56 ‘There would be great objection from a military point of view, to the emigration to the Straits of a large number of Sikhs or other fighting classes of India for enlistment under any foreign flag, either as soldiers or policemen’, another officer agreed.57 Anxieties about the outflow of Sikhs to Sumatra were relieved somewhat in September of 1895, when S.R. Lankester, the British consul at Batavia, reported that Sikhs travelling there were being employed as watchmen on tobacco estates by private companies, and were not being enlisted by the Dutch colonial forces.58 Nevertheless, British fears about their Indian subjects seeking military and police service with their European imperial rivals persisted, particularly in China, where increasing imperial competition from the Russians, French, Germans, and even Americans was becoming a source of significant concern after 1900.59 By 1902, these fears reached a fever pitch, as numerous reports of Sikhs and other Indians being recruited for colonial service by the Russians, French, and Germans began circulating between the Colonial, Foreign, War, and India offices. British officials generally agreed that the sudden increase in popularity of Indians and Sikhs soldiers among these powers was a result of their performance during the recent Boxer Rebellion. According to

 ‘I had a conversation with the Sergeant Major of the Sikh Police’, he wrote, ‘and it appears he has heard that some of these men have already been enlisted in the Dutch Police and it seems probable they will be enlisted in the Dutch Army’: ibid., para. 2, p. 5. 55  SSG to the GOI, 27 October 1894, BL, IOR, L/PJ/6/399, file 1024. 56  Note by H.B.W., 8 December 1894, NAI, Military B/June 1895/nos. 38–41. 57  See Note by R.M.J., 18 December 1894, ibid.; Letter no. 37584 the Colonial Office, 12 September 1902, NAI, Military B/April 1903/nos. 1512–16, no. 1512, paras. 2–4, p. 2. 58  Lankester to the Foreign Office, 6 September 1895, BL, IOR, L/PJ/6/406, file 1783. 59  There was a tone of lament among officials, who noted how just 20 years prior, the British had been the undisputed European power in China, but now had to share that power with the encroaching Russian, French, German, and even American empires: Notes on Political Situation by General Alfred Gaselee, 12 July 1901, BL, IOR, L/ MIL/7/16778. 54

Imperial Rivalries and Imperial Anxieties195

A.K. Rawlins, an officer attached to the 24th Punjab Infantry during the Rebellion, the Indian troops had been greatly admired for the precision of their marching, drill, discipline, and had ‘won the admiration of everybody, particularly the Germans and Americans’.60 In January of 1903, E.G. Barrow of the Indian Military Department also noted how the ‘­virtues of the Indians [were] becoming better appreciated by f­ oreigners’ since the campaign in China, and that the ‘evil’ of foreign enlistment was on the rise.61 Britain’s imperial rivals in China were often able to attract Indians into their service by offering superior pay. As early as August 1902, Barrow feared that this would encourage large numbers of Indians to ‘seek their fortunes in the Far East’, at the expense of British interests.62 Officials were particularly worried that Sikhs had acquired a special reputation among foreigners for being ‘pure mercenaries’. The manager of the Peking-Hankow railway, a Mr Bouillard, for instance, was reported as having stated that, ‘if [Sikhs] will serve Germans at Kiauchau, and Dutch in Sumatra, they will serve Belgians or any one else. Believe me, your Sikhs would serve even the Chinese if they were sufficiently paid – they have no regard for any particular flag – all they care about is ­money’.63 Other reports claiming that large numbers of Indian soldiers were resigning from their posts in order to seek more lucrative opportunities among Britain’s rivals only seemed to confirm these suspicions. The British Consulate-General in Hankow, for example, complained how ‘the attraction of service in Manchuria and California as watchmen on high pay led to constant resignations’. A considerable number of other Indians were rumoured to be employed by firms and banks in the German Concessions, and a few were even seen working for various Chinese institutions as watchmen.64 In late July of 1902, Sir Ernest Satow, the British minister for Peking, reported that a number of Indians, including Sikhs, were being employed by the Russians at Port Arthur, and along the Manchurian Railway. According to Satow, there were at least 20 Indians in Port Arthur alone, all of whom had arrived there via Shanghai after their previous terms of service had expired.65 Many similar reports of Indians serving with foreign European powers, however, were much more difficult to ­corroborate.  Letter by A.K. Rawlins, 18 January 1901, BL, IOR Mss/Eur/F258/6.  Note by E.G. Barrow, 19 January 1903, NAI, Military B/April 1903/nos. 1512–16. 62  Ibid. 63  Note by A.H. Bingley, 19 September 1902, ibid., Appendix I. 64  Fraser to Jordon, 21 November 1906, NAI, Military B/July 1909/nos. 1329–32, no. 1329, paras. 3–4, p. 4. 65  Telegram no. 218 from Satow, 23 July 1902, NAI, Military B/April 1903/nos. 1512–16. 60 61

196

Imperial Recruiting and Imperial Anxieties, 1870–1920

Information about discharged members of the Hong Kong and Singapore Artillery battalions taking up service with the Germans in Kiautschou, for instance, were often based on nothing more than ‘hearsay’ or rumours, while other reports of Indians serving with the French and Russians in China often remained unconfirmed.66 And those few cases which could be verified simply fuelled the existing paranoia about foreign recruiting by confirming what many British officials already suspected.67 As concerns about rival imperial powers recruiting Indian subjects continued to mount, the Foreign Office urged the India Office to take action.68 In response, the GOI claimed that the ‘surest means of arresting this flow of fighting men to foreign service’ was to repatriate all Indian servicemen before the expiry of their terms of service or dismissal.69 This would also mean that all future recruiting operations within India would be conducted entirely through Indian authorities, and that Britain’s colonies would no longer even be permitted to enlist Indians who had travelled by their own means in order to seek employment with these administrations locally. Unsurprisingly, this met with strong opposition from some of the colonies. The Governor of the Straits Settlements, F.A. Swettenham, argued that this would be both more expensive and less effective than the existing system of recruitment. Hundreds of Sikhs and Pashtuns, he pointed out, emigrated to the Straits Settlements and the Federated Malay States every year in order to obtain military or police work, and would be quite undeterred by government injunctions.70 A.W. O’Sullivan, the Assistant Colonial Secretary and Assistant Superintendent of Indian Immigration in Singapore, even went so far as to play down the threat represented by foreign enlistment altogether, suggesting that the so-called ‘tendency’ of Indians to seek employment with Britain’s European rivals was ‘rather exaggerated’.71 Sikhs, he argued, were ‘greedy of money’ and foreign agents would be unable to enlist them in large numbers due to the sheer expense.72 In China, officials were generally much more supportive of the GOI’s proposals, but nonetheless maintained that Indians would still be needed to provide  Gascoigne to Chamberlain, 2 August 1902, BL, IOR, L/MIL/7/12272; Colonial Office to the War Office, 12 September 1902, ibid. 67  Note by E.G. Barrow, 19 January 1903, NAI, Military B/April 1903/nos. 1512–16. 68  Foreign Office to the India Office, 5 August 1902, ibid., no. 1512, para. 2, p. 3. 69  GOI to Hamilton, 9 April 1903, ibid., no. 1516, para. 3, p. 7. 70  SSG to Chamberlain, 12 August 1903, National Archives, Kew (NA), FO/17/1765. 71  Minute by A.W. O’Sullivan, NAI, Military B/June 1905/nos. 1450–62, no. 1450, para. 1, p. 7. 72  O’Sullivan also pointed out that Indians were already prevented from travelling to ‘­prohibited’ territories without a permit, and that the GOI’s proposal to regulate this was thus redundant: ibid., para. 5, p. 8. 66

Imperial Rivalries and Imperial Anxieties197

crucial security services for mills and private corporations operating in Shanghai.73 Sikhs, in particular, were considered to be a ‘permanent necessity’ for the defence and policing of the port.74 Between 1905 and 1909, Britain’s overseas colonies throughout Southeast and East Asia experimented with variations of the new recruiting scheme.75 By 1908, however, many of these governments began complaining that it was having little effect in stopping the outflow of India’s ‘fighting races’ to overseas territories. In February, Frederick Lugard, the Governor of Hong Kong, reported that there had been ‘no decrease at all in the number of eligible recruits who offer themselves locally’, and that Indians continued to seek employment with Britain’s imperial rivals since the regulations provided ‘no check whatever upon their migration further eastwards to Japan, Kiautschou, the Chinese Treaty Ports, and even Canada’.76 Shanghai and Tientsin also reported that numerous Indians continued to present themselves locally for service and that these numbers were actually on the rise now that the demand for them had lessened in places like Japan, Vladivostock, and Vancouver.77 The repatriation of Indians following the termination of their terms of service was also exceedingly difficult to enforce. As the Consular-General at Hankow pointed out a few years earlier, it was nearly impossible to keep accurate records of all the Indians coming and going in busy port cities.78 According to the Hong Kong Government, there was often little officials could do to prevent these individuals from simply disembarking at Singapore or another large port on their way back to India.79 Faced with this mounting pressure and opposition from these other colonial administrations, the GOI eventually decided the scrap the scheme in July of 1909.80  Brodrick to Curzon, 25 December 1903, ibid., para. 2, p. 1.  The majority of the 181 Indians serving as police in Shanghai were Sikhs from the Lahore District: Memorandum on the Employment of Natives of India at Shanghai, 31 August 1903, NA, FO/17/1765. 75  The governments of the Straits Settlements, Sarawak, and North Borneo, for example, agreed to repatriate Indians before their terms of service had expired but reserved the right to continue enlisting men who presented themselves locally. Many of the administrations of the Chinese concessions, on the other hand, agreed to obtain their recruits exclusively through the Indian Army: See GOI to Brodrick, 8 June 1905, NAI, Military B/June 1905/nos. 1450–62, no. 1461, para. 5, p. 19; GOI to Morley, 1 July 1909, NAI, Military B/July 1909/nos. 1329–32, no. 1331, para. 3, p. 33. 76  Lugard to Elgin, 11 February 1908, NAI, Military B/July 1909/nos. 1329–32, no. 1329, para. 3, p. 11. 77  Jordon to Grey, 27 October 1908, ibid., no. 1330, para. 6, p. 26. 78  Fraser to Jordon, 21 November 1906, ibid., no. 1329, para. 5, p. 4. 79  Lugard to Elgin, 11 February 1908, NAI, Military B/July 1909/nos. 1329–32, no. 1329, para. 6, pp. 11–12. 80  GOI to Morley, 1 July 1909, ibid., no. 1331, para. 7, p. 33. 73 74

198

Imperial Recruiting and Imperial Anxieties, 1870–1920

The ultimate inability of the GOI to regulate the recruitment and overseas deployment of its Indian soldiers and policemen provides a striking example of the difficulties and limitations of regulating the migration of imperial subjects in an increasingly dynamic, mobile, and trans-imperial era. Indians not only provided vital security services for the empire, but they were also an important source of non-military labour. As a result, imperial officials were always reluctant about placing too many restrictions on their movements.81 Attempts by the GOI to regulate the outward flow of their premier ‘fighting classes’ were additionally constrained by the sheer demands placed on them by Britain’s non-Indian colonies by their frequent appeals to the wider question of imperial defence.82 The Punjab and Indian governments essentially became victims of their own success in propagating the idea of ‘martial races’ and became the ­primary recourse for an expanding empire desperately in need of coercive capital. ‘Martial race’ credentials provided enterprising Indians with the opportunity to obtain more lucrative employment not just with Britain’s non-Indian colonies, but among its imperial rivals as well. Though the number of Indians employed by other European powers was probably quite small, this did little to assuage the anxieties and fears of the GOI. ‘If men are to be enlisted from India to fight against us’, Lord Curzon warned in 1903, ‘the solidarity of India as a political factor in the East is gone and I would take any steps however strong to prevent so ruinous a consummation’.83 Once imperial officials let the genie of foreign recruitment out of the bottle, it was exceedingly difficult to force it back. The empire’s demand for relatively inexpensive and abundant military and police labour gave rise to a dynamic trans-imperial network which British imperial officials found increasingly difficult to control, and which Britain’s imperial rivals found increasingly easy to tap into for their own benefit. 5.5

Imperial (In)Security and the Ghadar Movement of the First World War

The years between 1905 and 1913 saw the emergence of a new form of radical and violent revolutionary Indian nationalism, both at home and abroad. In Bengal, Lord Curzon’s deeply unpopular decision to partition  As the government of the Straits Settlements pointed out in 1903, many of those Indians who travelled to the colony in search of military employment but were rejected often found employment in non–military capacities: SSG to the Colonial Office, 12 August 1903, NA, FO/17/1765. 82  Metcalf, Imperial Connections, p. 125. 83  Note by Curzon, 25 February 1903, NAI, Military B/April 1903/nos. 1512–16. 81

Imperial (In)Security and the Ghadar Movement

199

the province in 1905 galvanised young revolutionaries, and gave rise to an armed campaign of terrorism that resulted in the famous assassination attempt against Viceroy Lord Hardinge in Delhi in 1912.84 Though less prevalent than in Bengal, revolutionary violence spread to other parts of India as well, including Madras, Bombay, the United Provinces, and even Punjab. In an attempt to stem this tide of revolutionary and seditious activity, the GOI passed a series of repressive laws granting it new executive powers, including the Seditious Meetings Act (1907) and the Press Act (1908). Outside the subcontinent, radical thinkers like Shyamji Krishnavarma declared solidarity with other nationalist movements attempting to shake off the yoke of colonial oppression in Ireland and Egypt, and ‘India Houses’ established in London, New York, and Tokyo became centres of revolutionary action.85 In 1909, an Indian ­student named Madan Lal Dhingra assassinated W.H. Curzon Wyllie, the aide to the Secretary of State for India, in London.86 Wyllie’s shocking assassination highlighted the global reach of Indian revolutionary nationalism, and prompted renewed and vigorous efforts on the part of British intelligence agencies to unearth and disrupt dangerous and seditious organisations and networks.87 On the eve of the First World War, then, British imperial authorities in both in India and abroad had begun arming themselves with new sets of powers and prerogatives in order to root out and destroy the menace of Indian revolutionary terrorism. Following the outbreak of the War in the summer of 1914, the GOI took even greater steps to expand and strengthen these powers. In March of 1915, faced with mounting  See, generally, Peter Heehs, The Bomb in Bengal: The Rise of Revolutionary Terrorism in India, 1900–1910 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993). 85  See Harald Fischer-Tiné, ‘Indian Nationalism and the “World Force”: Transnational and Diasporic Dimensions of the Indian Freedom Movement on the Eve of the First World War’, Journal of Global History, 2:3 (November 2007): pp. 325–44; Michael Silvestri, ‘“The Sinn Féin of India”: Irish Nationalism and the Policing of Revolutionary Terrorism in Bengal’, Journal of British Studies, 39:4 (October 2000): pp. 454–86; Peter Heehs, ‘Foreign Influences on Bengali Revolutionary Terrorism 1902–1908’, Modern Asian Studies, 28:3 (July 1994): pp. 533–56. 86  The day after his execution, the London Daily News published Dhingra’s alleged final words. ‘I believe that a nation held down by foreign bayonet [sic] is in a perpetual state of war’, Dhingra claimed, ‘since open battle is rendered impossible to a disarmed race. I attacked by surprise; since guns were denied me I drew forth my pistol and fired. The only lesson required in India at present is to learn how to die, and the only way to teach it is by dying ourselves. Therefore I die, and glory in my martyrdom. My only prayer to God is that may I be reborn of the same Mother, and may I redie [sic] in the same sacred cause till the cause is successful, and she stands free for the good of humanity and to the glory of God. Bande Mataram’: ‘Dhingra Hanged’, London Daily News, 18 August 1909, p. 7. 87  Popplewell, Intelligence and Imperial Defence, chap. 5. 84

200

Imperial Recruiting and Imperial Anxieties, 1870–1920

Figure 5.1  ‘Unrest in Bengal’, Black & White, 13 July 1907 (author’s own collection) This magazine cover captures the unease and fearfulness of the white British community about the growing threat of ‘terrorist outrages’.

r­evolutionary activity, the GOI passed the notorious Defence of India Act. Modelled after the Defence of the Realm Act, the DOI Act granted colonial authorities in India the power to detain political suspects without charge or trial, and to conduct political trials using special commissions

Imperial (In)Security and the Ghadar Movement

201

that did not require a jury.88 Following the war, acting under recommendations made by the Rowlatt Committee,89 the GOI decided to extend the Defence of India Act, leading to widespread protests in Punjab that eventually culminated in the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre at Amritsar in 1919. Yet despite the widely acknowledged importance and influence of the DOI Act, its ideological and administrative origins remain relatively understudied and poorly understood. This law was not, as most historians would have it, a response primarily motivated by the very real and sustained threat of revolutionary violence in Bengal.90 Rather, it was firmly rooted in the anxious ideological and administrative ethos of the Punjab School of governance, and was the product of a sustained lobbying effort on the part of Punjab Lieutenant-Governor Michael O’Dwyer, who used the greatly exaggerated of the Ghadar Movement in order to expand the arsenal of coercive powers at his disposal. The British reaction to Ghadar, we shall see, provides yet another striking example of how the use of Punjabi military and police labour actually became a source of chronic colonial anxiety and insecurity, and led to new ­authoritarian interventions on the part of the colonial state. By 1913, after facing years of systemic racial prejudice, exclusion, and economic exploitation in the United States and Canada, a growing number of Indians who had migrated to the Pacific Coast of North America as policemen, labourers, and students had become thoroughly disillusioned with the hollow promises of an empire that claimed to protect their rights and dignity while doing little to promote this. Political repression and racial discrimination combined to produce a new form of political awareness among these Indian expatriates. In order to safeguard their political rights and freedoms, Indians formed themselves into new student and religious associations, such as the Hindustan Association of the United States and the Khalsa Diwan Society. In the spring of 1913, the Pacific Coast Hindi Association (PCHA), an organisation devoted to promoting workers’ rights in the lumber mills and camps along the Pacific Northwest, invited Lala Har Dayal, a former Indian Civil Service

 Ibid., pp. 174–5.  Report of the Sedition Committee, para. 197, p. 210. 90  See, for example, Peter Robb, The Government of India and Reform: Policies Towards Politics and the Constitution 1916–1921 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), chap. 6; Popplewell, Intelligence and Imperial Defence, pp. 174–5, 200. Most colonial accounts also tend to privilege the terrorist threat in Bengal: James Campbell Ker, Political Trouble in India, 1907–1917 (Calcutta: Superintendent Government Printing, 1917); Charles Tegart, Terrorism in India: A Speech Delivered before the Royal Empire Society (London: The Royal Empire Society, 1933). 88 89

202

Imperial Recruiting and Imperial Anxieties, 1870–1920

candidate turned radical intellectual, to join them in Oregon.91 Over the next several months, Har Dayal worked closely with the PCHA’s leaders, Guru Dutt Kumar and Sohan Singh Bhakna, to found what would ­eventually become the Ghadar Party. Literally meaning ‘rebellion’ or ‘mutiny’, Ghadar was marked out for its extremely radical, revolutionary content, and openly called for the ­complete and total overthrow of British rule through armed struggle. Tapping into the widespread disillusionment and frustration of Indian expatriates, Ghadar quickly attracted a strong following in North America. Within months of its founding, Ghadar counted more than 5,000 members among its ranks and had established branches in dozens of cities along the Pacific Coast.92 From its headquarters in San Francisco, the party launched the weekly Ghadar newspaper on 1 November 1913. Dedicated to exposing and overthrowing the evils of British imperial rule, the newspaper printed inflammatory poetry, revolutionary calls to violence, and even articles detailing how to manufacture and use a variety of weapons and explosives. By 1914, thousands of copies were being circulated in Gurmukhi and Urdu across Canada and the United States, Japan, China, Hong Kong, the Malay States, Singapore, Australia, British East Africa, South Africa, Morocco, Egypt, and Paris.93 Articles in the paper made frequent reference to other revolutionary movements from around the globe in Egypt, Ireland, Russia, China, and Mexico, suggesting that Ghadar perceived that it was part of a global struggle for freedom.94 Ghadarites also actively courted support from Britain’s wartime enemies and imperial rivals, notably the Germans, Ottomans, and Japanese.95 ‘We have now Turkey, Egypt, Cabul, China and Germany too with us’, declared one Ghadar poem. ‘Let us unite and strike. This is our opportunity.’96

 Seema Sohi, Echoes of Mutiny: Race, Surveillance and Indian Anticolonialism in North America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 55. 92  Ibid., p. 59. 93  Maia Ramnath, Haj to Utopia: How the Ghadar Movement Charted Global Radicalism and Attempted to Overthrow the British Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press 2011), p. 44. 94  Harish K. Puri, Ghadar Movement: Ideology, Organisation and Strategy (Amritsar: Guru Nanak Dev University Press, 1983), p. 72. 95  All of these efforts ultimately resulted in failure and contributed to the bitter disillusionment of Har Dayal following the war: see Har Dayal, Forty-Four Months in Germany and Turkey: February 1915 to October 1918 (London: P.S. King & Son Ltd., 1920). 96  ‘The Determined Purpose of Revolution’, Ghadar di Gunj (San Francisco: Hindustani Ghadar Press, 1916), BL, IOR, Mss Eur E288, p. 7. This particular poem appears in the second volume of a larger series of collected Ghadar poetry and literature. The first volume was published in 1914 and every entry in the series was printed under the same title, Ghadar di Gunj. This translation comes from a large collection of ‘hostile oriental propaganda’ that was compiled by both British and French imperial authorities during the First World War. 91

Imperial (In)Security and the Ghadar Movement

203

At the outbreak of the First World War, Ghadar was still a relatively young organisation, but Har Dayal saw an opportunity to put the ­party’s revolutionary programme into action. Building upon the widespread sense of anger and humiliation felt by the overseas Indian community due to increasingly restrictive immigration laws in Canada and the United States – most evidently witnessed during the recent and notorious Komagatu Maru incident of 1914 when a ship full of predominantly Sikh migrants was turned away from the Canadian port of Vancouver – Har Dayal exhorted his followers to return to India and other ­outposts throughout the empire in order to begin organising concerted uprisings against the British. Following this Ailan-i-Jang (‘call to war’), around 1,000 Indians from British Columbia, Washington, Oregon, and California joined nearly 7,000 Indians from Panama, the Philippines, Hong Kong, and Shanghai and boarded ships for India with the intention of spreading the Ghadar message.97 One of Ghadar’s main strategies was to subvert the loyalty of Indian servicemen and to turn them against the British, and during their return trips home Ghadarites actively preached sedition and revolution to Indian soldiers stationed at Hong Kong, Singapore, and Rangoon.98 With nearly half of its membership made up of veterans of the Indian Army or police services, and its overt references to the Rebellion or ‘Mutiny’ of 1857, Ghadar provided a chilling reminder of how even those with a history of loyalty to the British Empire could eventually turn against it.99 ‘Oh men in arms why are you supporting my oppressors’, asks Mother India in a poem entitled ‘The Cry of Motherland to her Soldiers.’ ‘Do you not know that the merciless are my enemies.’100 In many ways, the Ghadar threat would not have even been possible had it not been for the existence of the highly fluid and mobile networks of military and police labour that had been established in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in order to provide the empire with its much-needed coercive manpower. The great irony was that these same networks that had once provided security for the empire were now being actively turned against it by Ghadar.101  Sohi, Echoes of Mutiny, pp. 152–3.  Puri, Ghadar Movement, pp. 72, 84; Sohi, Echoes of Mutiny, p. 153; Ramnath, Haj to Utopia, p. 55. 99  Sohi, Echoes of Mutiny, p. 59. 100  ‘The Cry of Motherland to her Soldiers’, Ghadar di Gunj, p. 16, BL, IOR, Mss Eur E288, p. 16. 101  D.K. Lahiri Choudhury has similarly explored how the heightened connectedness of the empire through technologies such as the telegraph actually served to heighten imperial insecurities by allowing for the increased and more rapid circulation of seditious literature: D.K. Lahiri Choudhury, ‘Sinews of Panic and the Nerves of Empire: The Imagined State’s Entanglement with Information Panic, India c. 1800–1912’, Modern Asian Studies, 38:4 (October 2004): pp. 965–1002. 97 98

204

Imperial Recruiting and Imperial Anxieties, 1870–1920

With its fiery anti-British rhetoric and the widespread circulation of the Ghadar newspaper, British officials quickly realised that Ghadar posed a potentially considerable threat, and began arming themselves with powers they believed were required to safeguard against this growing menace. On 5 September 1914, the GOI passed the Ingress into India Ordinance, granting officials the power to restrict the movement of returned emigrants by either indefinitely detaining them or confining them to their villages under police surveillance.102 The Ordinance was first used against the passengers aboard the Komagatu Maru that arrived outside of Calcutta on 29 September. After violently fatal clashes between local authorities and the predominantly Sikh emigrants at the small town of Budge-Budge just outside of Calcutta, many of the passengers were arrested or interned under the provisions of the Ordinance.103 Between September and December 1914, hundreds of other returning emigrants arriving on ships were also interned or restricted to their villages, including many prominent Ghadar leaders. Although these arrests helped destabilise Ghadar’s organisation by throwing its leadership into disarray, the sheer volume of returning emigrants was such that British authorities were unable to completely stop the flow of men, seditious literature, and weapons into India.104 Ghadarites were said to have smuggled in revolvers and ammunition by hiding them in false bottoms of boxes or even under the same cloth used to cover the Guru Granth Sahib (the main Sikh holy text).105 On 19 December 1914, the Punjab Government reported that returned emigrants who had managed to evade capture were responsible for a series of violent crimes throughout the province, including the murder of police officials and rural notables, armed robberies, and attacks against the railways. Most alarming of all were the reports that Ghadarites were actively attempting to infiltrate the ranks of Indian Army regiments in order to foment mutiny.106 In true Punjab School fashion, LieutenantGovernor Michael O’Dwyer insisted that ordinary law was i­nsufficient to tackle this growing problem of rampant criminality and overt revolutionary activity, and urged the GOI to adopt special legislation to

 Between October 1914 and December 1917 a total of 331 suspected Ghadarites were interned under the Ingress into India Ordinance, while a further 2,576 were confined to their villages: Report of the Sedition Committee para. 145, p. 160. 103  Ibid., para. 133, p. 148. 104  Ibid., para. 134, p. 149. 105  O’Dwyer, India as I Knew It, p. 193. As Puri points out, however, most of the ­weapons the Ghadarites attempted to smuggle into India were either abandoned or thrown ­overboard into the ocean in order to evade arrest: Puri, Ghadar Movement, p. 163. 106  PG to the GOI, 19 December 1914, BL, IOR, P/CONF/7, para. 3, p. 1019. 102

Imperial (In)Security and the Ghadar Movement

205

deal with these returned emigrants. A draft ordinance submitted by the Punjab Government called for an extremely streamlined trial procedure that would allow authorities to promptly dispose of cases of a ‘political or quasi-political nature’ by eliminating the committal procedure, disregarding witnesses or evidence believed to have been offered in order to cause delay, and barring appeals, even in capital offences. ‘Any delay or weakness in dealing with such manifestations’, the Punjab Government claimed, ‘is certain to encourage these tendencies and to draw to the revolutionary gangs a large number of lawless and desperate characters’. The draft ordinance also provided for the swift punishment of village officers who did not promptly fulfil their duties, and for communal fines to be levied against villages found to be colluding with or harbouring criminals. Interestingly enough, many of the provisions of this draft ordinance were pulled directly from the revised 1901 Murderous Outrages Regulation and the Frontier Crimes Regulation that were currently in effect in the NWFP.107 Despite its draconian provisions, the Punjab Government insisted that the bulk of law-abiding and loyal Punjabis would welcome this measure since it would restore the security and tranquillity of the province.108 In a subsequent letter to the GOI from 5 January 1915, the Punjab Government reassured that the draft ordinance was meant to be an ‘emergency weapon’ only, and was ‘in no way intended to oust the operation of the ordinary law in dealing with normal crime or normal conditions’.109 Despite the Punjab Government’s assurances to the contrary, Viceroy Hardinge believed that any recourse to ‘drastic ordinances’ would only serve to alienate the general public, and turn them against the British. ‘In dealing with a half-a-dozen troublesome people’, he wrote in a letter to the Secretary of State for India Lord Crewe, ‘we should probably exasperate many thousands’.110 Crewe also concurred with Hardinge’s assessment.111 Although Hardinge and Crewe’s reticence would seem to support Richard Popplewell’s claim that the British response to revolutionary violence during the war was characterised by a measured and ‘restrained’ response that attempted to avoid indiscriminate repression,112 the fact of the matter was that there were actually many within the GOI who supported the Punjab Government’s  Ibid., pp. 1020–5.  Ibid., para. 7, p. 1020. 109  PG to the GOI, 5 January 1915, ibid., para. 5, p. 1028. 110  Hardinge to Crewe, 22 January 1915, BL, IOR, Mss Eur Photo 473/1–3, fp. 12. 111  ‘And as to ingress’, he wrote ‘I agree that the grumbling over the ordinance would be more mischievous than the free movement of a certain number of inconvenient ­cantankerous people’: Crewe to Hardinge, 19 February 1915, ibid., fp. 23–4. 112  Popplewell, Intelligence and Imperial Defence, pp. 171, 190. 107 108

206

Imperial Recruiting and Imperial Anxieties, 1870–1920

calls for special action. As Hardinge confessed, he was under increasing pressure from his own Executive Council to undertake action along the lines suggested by the Punjab Government.113 Nevertheless, Hardinge initially held firm, and rejected the Punjab Government’s request for special powers.114 It was not long, however, before the Punjab Government renewed its efforts to press for the adoption of emergency powers, and between late February and early March they sent a stream of correspondence to this effect. Between 19 and 24 February, acting on information received from the Criminal Investigate Department, police raided four different houses across Lahore suspected of harbouring Ghadar agents. Altogether, the police seized one sword; two revolvers; nine bombs and a variety of bomb-making equipment; eleven revolutionary flags; and two printing presses used to produce leaflets containing poetry from Ghadr di Gunj (literally ‘Echoes of Mutiny’), a compilation of Ghadar writings and ­literature.115 Fourteen individuals were also arrested in connection with the raids, including key Ghadar leaders such as Amar Singh Rajput, Jamna Dass, and Bhai Parmanand. The arrest of the Lahore conspirators ­provided Punjab authorities with the strongest tangible evidence to date of the existence of a concerted campaign to spread revolutionary sedition throughout the province, and the Punjab Government was keen to tie these men to what they described as an ‘epidemic of murder, dacoity, and general lawlessness that has spread over the central districts within the last two months’.116 Although Ghadar members were undoubtedly responsible for a number of armed robberies and assassinations of local Indian officials across the province, the Punjab Government’s claims about the extent of their involvement were exaggerated. Rather than being the products of pernicious Ghadar influences, many of the cases listed by the Punjab Government seem to have been examples of ordinary crime, exacerbated no doubt by rising food prices and the general economic disruption caused by the war.117 Of these, only a handful could actually be directly linked to the revolutionary group, and local police officers even openly admitted that these connections were sometimes tenuous at

 Hardinge to Crewe, 22 January 1915, BL, IOR, Mss Eur Photo 473/1–3, fp. 12.  The GOI was particularly wary about withdrawing the right of appeal: GOI to the PG, 22 January 1915, BL, IOR, P/CONF/7, para. 3, p. 1039. 115  PG to the GOI, 25 February 1915, ibid., pp. 1047–8. 116  Ibid., para. 6, p. 1042. 117  The Punjab Government itself had already indicated that deteriorating economic conditions and famine prices were one of the reasons for growing discontent and criminality throughout the province in its first letter to the GOI in December: PG to the GOI, 19 December 1914, ibid., para. 6, p. 1020. 113 114

Imperial (In)Security and the Ghadar Movement

207

best. Dacoits who happened also to be Sikhs suddenly became Ghadar agents, and gangs wearing masks and any sort of clothing associated with what was believed to be a makeshift Ghadar ‘uniform’ were automatically assumed to have fallen under their sway.118 Although the evidence that the Ghadar members were primarily responsible for the sharp increase in violent crime across Punjab was somewhat thin, what was clear was that members of the organisation had been making concerted efforts to tamper with the loyalty of Indian soldiers throughout the province. On the night of 19 February, an armed party of about 40 men, mostly Sikhs, attempted to march upon the Ferozepore Cantonment in the hopes of looting the magazine and securing weapons.119 Fortunately for the British, Punjab authorities had caught wind of the plan through the aid of a police informant named Kirpal Singh who had managed to infiltrate the Ghadar ranks.120 As a result, the camp’s defences were bolstered by calling for reinforcements from a nearby European regiment and doubling all the guards and pickets around the perimeter. Upon discovering these added precautions as they approached the camp, the armed band dispersed and fled. Officials subsequently concluded that the aborted attack was part of a premeditated plan involving six disaffected soldiers of the 26th Punjabis who had been ‘tainted’ by Ghadar influences while previously stationed at Hong Kong.121 Punjab authorities also learned that Ghadar members were attempting to foment a mutiny in the Lahore Cantonment with the help of sympathisers they had recruited within the 23rd Cavalry stationed there.122 This mutiny was meant to coincide with the attack on Ferozepore, and both of these events were intended to trigger the beginning of a full-scale uprising throughout Punjab that had been scheduled for 21 February. Though neither of these plans came to fruition and the general rising never materialised, Ghadar’s efforts to subvert the loyalty of Punjab’s vital military-agrarian classes were deeply alarming. This was the nightmare scenario for Punjab administrators, and the

 Following an attack by a group of six men on a Sikh-owned shop in the village of Barnwali in the Ferozepore district, the Superintendent of Police was fairly certain that it was the work of local criminals. However, because the assailants were wearing the Ghadar ‘uniform’, he conceded that he could not discount the possibility that they were revolutionaries. This ‘uniform’ was said to consist of a mask or veil to conceal the face, and kurta pyjamas covered by an overcoat: PG to the GOI, 25 February 1915, ibid., para. 12, p. 1045. 119  Ferozepore Deputy Commissioner to the Jullundur Division Commissioner, 22 February 1915, ibid., para. 16, p. 1053. 120  Popplewell, Intelligence and Imperial Defence, p. 173. 121  Ferozepore Deputy Commissioner to the Jullundur Division Commissioner, 22 February 1915, BL, IOR/P/CONF/7, para. 16, p. 1053. 122  PG to the GOI, 5 March 1915, ibid., para. 3, p. 1054. 118

208

Imperial Recruiting and Imperial Anxieties, 1870–1920

Punjab government made it clear that they needed to take every possible precaution ‘to ensure that the poisonous teaching of open rebellion is kept both from the Army and the people from whom the army is recruited’.123 Faced with a soaring crime rate, an ‘alarmist’ press, the circulation of revolutionary propaganda, and obvious attempts by Ghadar to incite mutiny and a general uprising among Punjab’s vital soldier-cultivating classes, O’Dwyer strongly urged the GOI to grant his government the emergency powers he so eagerly coveted. As the Punjab Government put it in a letter from 25 February, ‘the situation in the Punjab cannot safely be allowed to drift any further’.124 These included measures to censor the press, the right to intern and restrict the movement of suspected ­revolutionaries, and the ability to try political crimes in swift, summary proceedings. Referring to the case of the Lahore conspirators, in particular, the Punjab Government stressed that it would be exceedingly difficult and time-consuming to try these individuals under a conventional conspiracy trial, and that they should instead be placed under the ‘curtailed procedure’ advocated in the draft ordinance proposed by his government from 19 December 1914. ‘The most cursory examination of the facts’, the Punjab Government wrote, ‘leaves no doubt at all that these men were in reality conspiring to wage war against the King and that they had at their disposal sufficient men and sufficient materials to secure them some measure of initial success, especially if they could secure, as they counted on doing, assistance from some of the men in the native regiments in Lahore cantonment’. As the Punjab Government concluded: ‘These men are rebels; they are not ordinary criminals.’125 After months of lobbying, including a personal meeting with Viceroy Hardinge in mid-March of 1915, O’Dwyer was finally able to convince the GOI to grant his government the special powers that he had so eagerly coveted.126 On 18 March 1915, Reginald Craddock, the Home Member for the Viceroy’s Executive Council, introduced the Defence of India Bill to the Legislative Council of India. In addition to eliminating the committal procedure, the right of appeal, and introducing a generally lower burden of proof, the bill provided for the establishment of special tribunals consisting of three commissioners empowered to try offences punishable by death, transportation, or imprisonment for up to seven  PG to the GOI, 25 February 1915, ibid., para. 8, p. 1042.  ‘Whether the draft Ordinance already submitted to the Government of India is approved in all its details or not’, they continued, ‘it is in His Honour’s opinion necessary that effective powers should be given to the local Government to deal with violence and political trouble without further delay’: ibid., para. 5, p. 1041. 125  PG to the GOI, 5 March 1915, ibid., para. 3, p. 1055. 126  Hardinge to Crewe, 18 March 1915, ibid., pp. 1057–8. 123 124

Imperial (In)Security and the Ghadar Movement

209

Figure 5.2  Sir Michael Francis O’Dwyer Portrait by Walter Stoneman, 1920. © National Portrait Gallery, London.

years.127 The bill also included an indemnity clause that excused individuals ‘for anything which is in good faith done or intended to be done under this Act’.128 In his opening speech, Craddock emphasised how the bill was necessary to prevent the spread of the ‘contagious disease’ of sedition before it turned into an ‘epidemic’ all across India. Craddock was also somewhat awkwardly at pains to point out that this in no way meant that the ordinary law of the country would be replaced with martial law, and that this was merely a temporary measure that would extend only for the duration of the war and for six months following its conclusion.129 Despite Craddock’s assurances that law-abiding Indians had nothing to fear from these measures – and that most would even welcome

 A Bill to Provide for Special Measures to Secure the Public Safety and the Defence of British India and for the More Speedy Trial of Certain Offences, 12 March 1915, ibid., p. 1061. 128  Ibid., p. 1063. 129  Legislative Council Proceedings (Debates), 18 March 1915, BL, IOR, V/9/41, p. 473. 127

210

Imperial Recruiting and Imperial Anxieties, 1870–1920

it – the bill predictably met with vigorous opposition from the Council’s non-­official Indian members. The Indian nationalist M.B. Dadabhoy described it as a ‘most unwelcome Bill’, claiming that it represented yet another example of the government’s tendency to enact ‘repressive legislation’. A government armed with the sorts of increased powers granted under the recent Indian Crimes Act (1908) and the Indian Conspiracy Act (1913), he pointed out, should have no need yet for yet another special act. Dadabhoy was particularly concerned with how the provisions of the bill potentially allowed the special tribunals to prosecute regular crimes, and argued that their use should be strictly limited to offences that were ‘likely to jeopardise the State’. Presciently, Dadabhoy also worried that the powers granted by the bill would be extended and used against Indians even after the war was over.130 Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya, the noted nationalist leader and educationist, vigorously urged for numerous revisions to the bill, arguing that it extended executive powers too widely and that the lack of appeals was particularly problematic since ‘there is always danger of irrevocable justice in the case of a death sentence’.131 Yet, despite repeated calls for amendments and revisions from Dadabhoy, Malaviya, and other non-official members of the Council, the bill was ultimately passed through with only a few cosmetic changes that did little to alter its fundamental principles. The 1915 Defence of India Act was one of the most notorious and controversial pieces of colonial legislation passed during the twentieth century, not least because of how it was used to great effect by the British colonial administration. Between 1915 and 1918, special tribunals ­convened under its provisions prosecuted a series of nine high-profile conspiracy trials, including the First Lahore Conspiracy Case (1915), which saw the arraignment of the key Ghadar leaders whose arrest as a result of the raids of 19–24 February had finally convinced the GOI of the need for such special legislation.132 In total, 28 individuals were sentenced to death by these special tribunals, while hundreds more were sentenced to imprisonment or transportation; only 29 were ever ­ acquitted.133 Combined with powers granted under the Ingress into India Ordinance, as well as the Murderous Outrages Act, hundreds of Indians were interned in jail throughout the war, while thousands of others were restricted to their villages under police surveillance.134  Ibid., pp. 479–80.  Ibid., p. 491.  F.C. Isemonger and J. Slattery, An Account of the Ghadr Conspiracy (1913–1915) (Lahore: Superintendent, Government Printing, 1919), pp. 140, 159–66. 133  Report of the Sedition Committee, para. 143, p. 157. 134  Ibid., para. 145, p. 160. 130 131 132

Imperial (In)Security and the Ghadar Movement

211

The DOI Act was the response of an anxious colonial government that felt it was under siege from an array of insidious revolutionary conspiracies: from the ongoing terrorist threat in Bengal, growing fears of the Pan-Islamic movement, to the so-called Hindu-German Conspiracy between 1914–17. None of these, however, were more frightening to the colonial administration than the Ghadar Movement. With its overt references to the great ‘Mutiny’ of 1857, and its mass appeals to both the army and the Punjabi peasantry, Ghadar was the very incarnation of the colonial state’s worst nightmare.135 After the war, O’Dwyer claimed that Ghadar was ‘by far the most serious attempt to subvert British rule in India’.136 Playing off old stereotypes and fears about Sikhs being credulous, warlike, and easily excitable, O’Dwyer pointed to the 1907 canal colony disturbances as proof about the dangers of allowing sedition to spread among such a combustible population.137 The Sedition Committee also came to a similar conclusion: It is evident that the Ghadr movement in the Punjab came within an ace of causing widespread bloodshed. With the high-spirited and adventurous Sikhs the interval between thought and action is short. If captured by inflammatory appeals, they are prone to act with all possible celerity and in a fashion dangerous to the whole fabric of order and constitutional rule.138

Once again, the very same people who were meant to be the guarantors of colonial security were also simultaneously perceived to be one of its greatest threats. Indeed, before the enactment of the DOI Act, O’Dwyer claimed that Punjab authorities ‘felt we were living over a mine full of explosives’.139 Despite the intense fear Ghadar generated, the great revolt it claimed to portend never materialised in Punjab. The movement itself was poorlycoordinated and severely miscalculated the amount of support it could obtain from ordinary Punjabis.140 Most of the peasantry who were meant

 Wagner, ‘The “Mutiny”-Motif ’.  ‘It took many forms’, he continued. ‘One was to stir up rebellion in Bengal, the leaders, arms, and ammunition being imported through Batavia and Siam. Another was to start a rising in Burma (then almost denuded of British troops and guarded mainly by Sikh military police who were to be incited to revolt) by the returning Ghadr emigrants from America, working into Burma through Siam. Both of these conspiracies were carefully planned under the general direction of the German Consul-General at Shanghai, but both were frustrated by the vigilance of the Indian authorities’: O’Dwyer, India as I Knew It, 1885–1925, p. 189. 137  O’Dwyer was writing during the height of the Akali movement, which was also at the forefront of his mind: ibid., p. 190. 138  Report of the Sedition Committee, para. 146, p. 112. 139  Michael O’Dwyer, India as I Knew It, 1885–1925 (London: Constable, 1925), p. 197. 140  Puri, Ghadar Movement, pp. 159, 176. 135 136

212

Imperial Recruiting and Imperial Anxieties, 1870–1920

to rise up were either indifferent or openly hostile to Ghadar; prominent members of the INC denounced their methods; Sikh religious leaders rallied their communities in proclaiming their loyalty to the British Crown; and local groups throughout the province actively worked alongside colonial authorities to help round up suspected Ghadar agents.141 The great irony of the Ghadar Movement, as Harish Puri points out, is that it actually helped to reaffirm the loyalty of Punjab in British eyes.142 Indeed, by as early as January of 1916, the Punjab Government was already proudly reporting that the movement had been effectively crushed, and that Sikhs were returning to their ‘amour propre’ and once again buying up land in the Montgomery canal colony in droves.143 This, then, raises the question of why it was necessary for the British to resort to such drastic measures in order to quash a movement that had very little real support. The Punjab Government, as we have seen, was a profoundly anxious colonial regime with a marked tendency towards authoritarianism and coercion precisely because it was so thoroughly preoccupied with its own stability and security. In the case of Ghadar, it is clear that Punjab officials greatly exaggerated the extent of this threat, and used it as a way of bolstering their already considerable arsenal of judicial and executive powers. At the same time, however, it is also e­ vident that this was not just a cynical political manoeuvre, and that many of these officials genuinely believed that the province was in imminent danger. Thus, while the spectre of Ghadar may have been somewhat chimerical, it nonetheless provided a powerful enough threat in the eyes of colonial administrators to warrant such a response. Indeed, the ability of the Punjab Government to eventually convince the GOI to buy into its claims concerning Ghadar shows just how seriously it was taken. Despite the fact that Bengal was home to a much more sustained and severe revolutionary movement, both before and during the war, Ghadar was viewed as being altogether more menacing and potentially destabilising. Shortly after the enactment of the DOI Act, the Secretary of State for India, Lord Crewe, confessed to Hardinge that the ‘Punjab story is serious reading; and tends to support my theory that the situation there is far greater than it is ever likely to be in Bengal’.144 Unlike Bengal, which was home to supposedly ‘soft’, ‘passive’, and ‘effete’ babus

 Report of the Sedition Committee, para. 145, p. 160; O’Dwyer, India as I Knew It, p. 198; Puri, Ghadar Movement, pp. 153, 166. 142  Puri, Ghadar Movement, p. 167. 143  Report of the Sedition Committee, para. 142, p. 157. 144  Crewe to Hardinge, 9 April 1915, IOR, Mss Eur Photo 473/1–3, fp. 74. 141

Conclusion213

(clerks),145 Punjab was the cradle of India’s virile and warlike martial races – it was the sword arm of the Raj, and the strategic lynchpin within a much wider strategy of imperial defence. No matter how remote the actual threat was, the Ghadar Movement attempt’s to topple this central pillar of British imperial rule could not be ignored. Ghadar’s ability to operate on such a global scale was ultimately made possible only through the same imperial formations and networks that it sought to subvert. The same railways, telegraph lines, and shipping lanes that had once been used to export Punjab’s coercive capital to the rest of the empire were now used to smuggle dissidents and arms back into the garrison state, where insurgents quickly turned their attention to raiding munitions depots, bombing strategic railways, and attempting to sow mutiny and dissent within the ranks of the Indian Army and its important recruiting grounds.146 Thus, while conferring undoubted imperial strategic defensive bonuses to Britain’s empire, the use of Indian and Punjabi soldiers and policemen overseas also ironically sowed the seeds for one of the most acute imperial panics during the first half of the twentieth century. 5.6 Conclusion Between 1880 and 1920, Punjabi soldiers and policemen reigned supreme as the premier imperial auxiliaries throughout the Indian Ocean World – they were the ‘guardians of empire’, as some have put it.147 In many ways, this would not have been possible had it not been for high degree of militarisation within India and Punjab. The project of pacifying Punjab’s ‘turbulent’ Sikhs, which began as early as 1849, set the Punjab administration down a self-perpetuating path of patronage and support for what would become one of the most coveted martial races of the 1880s. As imperial competition between European powers ramped up in Africa and East Asia, India and its garrison state of Punjab came to represent one of the best ways for the British to keep pace with the expanding economic, political, and military influence of their rivals. The development of such a substantially militarised colonial state in India at the fringes of the British world became absolutely essential to  Sinha, Colonial Masculinity, p. 15. As Alfred Lyall put it in a letter from 1908: ‘The Bengali is a cowardly rascal. He puts forward schoolboys and raw youths to throw bombs’: Durand, Life of Lyall, p. 428. 146  For more on how these same tools of dominion became tools of subversion, see Choudhury, ‘Sinews of Panic’. 147  David Killingray and David Omissi (eds.), Guardians of Empire: the Armed Forces of the Colonial Powers c. 1700–1964 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999). 145

214

Imperial Recruiting and Imperial Anxieties, 1870–1920

the defence of Britain itself by providing a relatively small state with an alternate and otherwise unavailable means of developing a significant military force that was needed to police and protect its empire. However, although the relatively unrestricted mobility of these Indian servicemen helped provide Britain’s burgeoning empire with much-needed manpower to conquer and pacify new territories, it also brought with it its own problems and challenges. The sheer popularity of Punjabis, especially Sikhs, within this project placed significant strain on an Indian Army that was already dealing with perceived manpower shortages. Attempts by the GOI to regulate this type of recruitment were also severely constrained by the sheer momentum of this movement. As Britain’s other colonial governments became increasingly dependent on this outflow of Indian coercive capital, they also became invested in ensuring the unrestricted movement of these soldiers and policemen across the empire. This was compounded all the more by the fact that an ever-expanding number of enterprising Indians began to seek their fortunes abroad using their own private means once the lucrative prospects of foreign service had become well-known within Indian circles. This mobility was aided in no small part by the success of the martial races theory, which provided Punjabis and Indians with the necessary credentials to obtain such employment by an empire that was hungry for India’s premier soldiers. And, ironically, these extremely rigid categories deployed in India actually provided a means of social and economic mobility for certain groups travelling abroad to regions unfamiliar with India’s ‘true’ martial races. By the 1920s the so-called ‘craze’ for Sikhs and other Punjabis in imperial recruiting began to wane drastically. After decades of resistance to the idea, Britain’s colonies gradually opted to begin raising their own locally-recruited military and police units in favour of importing Punjabis, whose deployment overseas was now viewed increasingly with trepidation and anxiety. The growing influence of radical, anti-British organisations, including the Ghadar and Khilafat movements during the First World War, for example, helped to radicalise large numbers of Punjabi servicemen stationed abroad, and cast severe doubts on the continued reliability and trustworthiness of these groups as a whole in British eyes.148 Events such as the notorious Komagata Maru incident of 1914, as well as the increasingly restrictive immigration laws to white settler colonies, moreover, had a powerfully disillusioning impact on the enthusiasm of these Sikh and other migrant communities, weakening their own willingness to

 Metcalf, Imperial Connections, p. 205.

148

Conclusion215

support this continued imperial project, and helping rally them behind growing nationalist and anti-British ­movements both abroad and back home in India.149 The use of Indian soldiers overseas was, therefore, always a double-edged sword. In a sense, Punjab and British India essentially became victims of their own success. In so effectively mobilising Punjab’s internal economic, social, and political resources for war, the province inadvertently became the strategic lynch pin within a wider strategy of imperial defence, and the primary choice for other colonial governments seeking to bolster their own colonial forces. The sheer scale and momentum of these military and police labour networks opened up a trans-imperial space in which the Punjab and Indian governments could no longer ensure their monopoly over the movement and export of coercive capital. They were also increasingly subverted and used to ­piggy-back forms of sedition and dissidence back into India, meaning that the same networks that were supposed to be bolstering imperial security were, ironically, being used to subvert it.

 Tatla, Sikh Diaspora, p. 53; Metcalf, Imperial Connections, p. 132.

149

Conclusion: Colonial Vulnerability and the Insecurity of Empire

In an essay written just a year after the suppression of the Rebellion of 1857, Robert Cust, then a young officer within the early Punjab administration, bragged that, ‘It is the remarkable phenomenon of the English Rulers in India that they have no fear; either from ignorance, or the high spirit of youth, or the innate nobility of the conquering race, they go about alone among the people’.1 After demonstrating a commanding grasp of Indian languages, Cust began his Indian career in 1844 as an assistant to Major George Broadfoot, the Governor-General’s Agent for the NWF. In 1846 he was appointed as the Deputy Commissioner of the Hoshiarpur district in north-eastern Punjab, where he quickly became an ardent champion of John Lawrence’s unique style of paternal ­authoritarianism. Cust revelled in the personal authority the Punjab ­system allowed him, referring to the inhabitants of his district as his ‘­children’ and exhibiting all the swashbuckling swagger he was expected to project as their ‘natural sovereign’.2 In many ways, Cust was the archetypal Punjab School administrator, and his comments are a testament to the cult of the district officer: the mighty and courageous colonial administrator who shows no fear and never backs down. They are equally expressive of a wider culture of British sangfroid where coolness, and stoic determination in the face of adversity and danger were prized above all else. Perhaps best epitomised by Kipling’s enduringly popular poem, ‘If-’ (1910), the proverbial ‘stiff upper lip’ was one of the central conceits by which Britons imagined themselves from the mid-Victorian period onwards.3 E.M. Forster, for instance, praised the ‘bravery’ of the English nation, claiming that it was

 Robert Needham Cust, ‘The Indian District’, Linguistic and Oriental Essays:Written from the Year 1840 to 1897, 2 vols. (London: Luzac & Co., 1898), vol. 1, p. 245.  Ibid., pp. 234, 239. 3  Thomas Dixon, Weeping Britannia: Portrait of a Nation in Tears (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), chap. 14; Rudyard Kipling, ‘If-’, Rewards and Fairies (London: Macmillan and Co., 1910): pp. 175–6. 1

2

217

218

Conclusion: Colonial Vulnerability and the Insecurity of Empire

the steeliness of English nerves that made them ‘splendid at emergencies’.4 In the imperial world, this British coolness became even more pronounced when contrasted against the supposedly ‘excitable’, ‘hysterical’, ‘childish’, and excessively effusive colonial subjects they encountered.5 Yet for all of its bluster, this valorisation of masculinity, self-control, and emotional restraint was ultimately an untenable imperial phantasmagoria. Forster’s celebration of English courage, for example, sits somewhat uncomfortably alongside his later depiction of colonial society in A Passage to India (1924), where racial tensions between Indians and Britons aroused by the alleged assault of a white women, Adela Quested, at the hands of the Indian physician, Dr Aziz, can easily be read as a cipher for the latent anxieties about the ‘Mutiny’.6 Even Kipling was not always the unequivocal, jingoistic imperial cheerleader that his later incarnations seem to suggest he was, and many of his earlier stories actually evoke instances of colonial fallibility, frailty, and failure in India.7 Imperial ideologies championing the strength and indomitability of the British conquering spirit, therefore, tended to obscure the fundamental doubts and uncertainties that were central to the colonial experience. If we return to Cust, we can see this tension quite vividly. While on the one hand Cust’s statement appears to reflect the typical confidence, verve, and bravado we would expect from an all-powerful colonial administrator, when we read further, he also seems to raise some unsettling doubts about the supposed indomitability of this system: It is true, that both my superior officer, Frederick Mackeson, and my assistant, Robert Adams, fell by the hand of the assassin; and for years I had a loaded revolver under my pillow by night, and in a drawer of my table by day, but I never had once occasion to use it, and yet I had lived for years alone among the people in distant parts of India, and never had a bad night from anxiety, or felt the necessity of beating a hasty retreat. If once we lost this prestige, if the Officers of Government keep to the towns, and appear only with guards around them, our Empire, which is based on Opinion, is gone. The District Officer, on his horse among his people, is their Ruler and Master. Shut up in the towns he is a mere name and a puppet.8  ‘No doubt’, Forster wrote, ‘they are brave – no one will deny that – but bravery is partly an affair of the nerves, and the English nervous systems is well equipped for meeting a physical emergency. It acts promptly and feels slowly’: E.M. Forster, ‘Notes on the English Character’, Abinger Harvest (London: Edward Arnold & Co., 1936), p. 7. According to Thomas Dixon, the British were acutely aware that nations had different ‘emotional styles’ and went to great lengths in distinguishing these even between the different nations comprising the British isles: Dixon, Weeping Britannia, p. 206. 5  See, for example, Forster, ‘Notes on the English Character’, pp. 5–6. 6  E.M. Forster, A Passage to India (London: Edward Arnold, 1924). 7  See Rudyard Kipling, ‘Thrown Away’, Plain Tales from the Hills, pp. 15–26; also ibid., ‘On the City Wall’. 8  Cust, ‘The Indian District’, p. 245. 4

Conclusion: Colonial Vulnerability and the Insecurity of Empire219

The fact that Cust felt compelled to keep a loaded revolver near to him at all times while he was ‘alone among the people’ suggests that he remained acutely aware of the precariousness of his position and the possibility that his subjects might try to rise up against him. This sense of potential vulnerability is even more apparent when he warns about the dangers that would arise if the British were to lose their ‘prestige’. Without their image of invincibility and overwhelming power, Cust suggests that colonial authority would collapse. Thus, far from being a simple expression of the bold self-confidence and swagger of the Punjab School and colonial rule more generally, Cust’s statements actually evoke a troubling and uncomfortable realisation that British colonial power was fundamentally dependent on the illusion of its own invincibility. Cust’s dilemma – the simultaneous need to display strength and confidence while also being acutely aware of his own precariousness and ­vulnerability – brings to mind the central predicament in George Orwell’s well-known short story, ‘Shooting an Elephant’ (1936). In this story, the narrator, a British colonial police officer, feels compelled to kill a rampaging elephant in order to avoid the ‘jeers’ and ‘laughter’ of the local Burmese population: I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys. He becomes a sort of hollow, posing dummy, the conventionalized figure of a sahib. For it is the condition of his rule that he shall spend his life in trying to impress the ‘natives’, and so in every crisis he has got to do what the ‘natives’ expect of him. He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it. I had got to shoot the elephant. I had committed myself to doing it when I sent for the rifle. A sahib has got to act like a sahib; he has got to appear resolute, to know his own mind and do definite things. To come all that way, rifle in hand, with two thousand people marching at my heels, and then to trail feebly away, having done nothing – no, that was impossible. The crowd would laugh at me. And my whole life, every white man’s life in the East, was one long struggle not to be laughed at.9

Orwell’s portrayal of an anxious colonial official trapped by his duty to preserve the prestige of both himself and his fellow Europeans in the face of a potentially threatening crowd of ‘sneering yellow faces’ reveals both the disquiet and absurdity of the colonial situation. As a tiny ­ruling elite, the British in India were always acutely aware of their own vulnerability against a foreign and potentially hostile colonised population, and understood that performative displays of strength and determination – in this case, the killing of an elephant – were all absolutely essential  George Orwell, ‘Shooting an Elephant’, in George Bott (ed.), George Orwell: Selected Writings (London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1958), pp. 29–30.

9

220

Conclusion: Colonial Vulnerability and the Insecurity of Empire

components of maintaining their authority and power. Indeed, the fundamental ‘bluff ’ of colonialism consisted of convincing both the coloniser and the colonised that this was a stable, durable, and irresistible system of rule. By taking the apparent weaknesses and vulnerabilities of the colonial state as its primary object of study, this book has sought to provide an altogether different image of the British Empire in India to which we are traditionally accustomed. Instead of being a wholly powerful, confident, and successful endeavour, we have seen how the British colonial experience in India was mediated by a pervasive and constant sense of anxiety, vulnerability and uncertainty about the survival of the colonial regime. This was what might be termed the ‘dark underside’ of the ideologies that sustained the British Raj. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the British worried predominantly about being overwhelmed by the various Indian successor states that had consumed the Mughal Empire or by other hostile imperial rivals, such as the French or Russians. Yet even as the Company state strengthened its armies and defeated its rivals, it remained wary of internal insurrection and the threat posed by various criminal and ‘fanatical’ conspiracies. Following the Rebellion of 1857, these recurring anxieties were given a very specific focus through the proliferation of the so-called ‘Mutiny’-motif, which served as an indelible reminder of the delicate and precarious position of India’s colonial overlords. The insecure and anxious foundations of British colonial rule, in turn, provided the justification for the proliferation and expansion of a range of authoritarian, coercive, and despotic practices, all of which were justified in the name of preserving the security of the colonial state. In reality, the British were far from weak or powerless, and retained a devastating capacity to impose their will (when necessary) until the final days of Raj. The key point, however, is that British colonial officials frequently believed they were weaker and more exposed than they actually were and acted accordingly. Sometimes this meant that shrewd administrators engaged in calculated gambits aimed at strengthening the power and authority of the colonial state. Other times, this anxiety manifested itself in sudden, panicked, and extreme outbursts of colonial violence, such as the ‘Kooka outbreak’ of 1872 or the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre. In Punjab, endemic concerns about the inherent ‘turbulence’ of the province’s inhabitants gave rise to a colonial administration that was obsessed with ensuring the loyalty and contentment of its ‘warlike’ and ‘martial’ inhabitants, including groups like the Sikhs. By tying Sikh interests to those of the colonial state, British authorities sought to create a stable and productive class of subjects who would support the colonial regime. Yet, in so doing, they also placed unprecedented importance on

Conclusion: Colonial Vulnerability and the Insecurity of Empire221

this same group and became extremely sensitive and anxious about anything that might potentially disrupt this delicate balance. As a result, Sikhs continued to straddle a somewhat ambiguous position between allies and adversaries. While at one moment they could be praised for their martial might and loyalty, the same qualities that made Sikhs such formidable allies could also be seen as an existential threat to the colonial state, as was witnessed during the disturbances of 1907 and 1919. The overwhelming focus of existing historical literature on the successes of colonial Punjab’s formidable garrison state and its role as a bastion of British loyalty, however, has tended to obscure this complex and highly anxious relationship. As this book has shown, we cannot fully grasp the dynamics of colonial state-building in Punjab without a greater understanding of how it was fundamentally premised on nervously negotiated and mediated settlements with its ‘warlike’ inhabitants. When it came to the administration of law and order, Punjab officials believed that unrestrained, despotic authority was the only way to contain the province’s supposedly factious, warlike, and dangerous inhabitants. Although this idea gradually fell out of favour with the proliferation of substantial legal codes in the 1860s and 1870s, the wider colonial establishment in both Punjab and India continued to believe that British authorities required strong executive powers in order to safeguard the colonial regime in times of crisis or emergency. While the ‘Kooka outbreak’ of 1872 showed the limits of this logic, the acrimonious public and private debates that it engendered demonstrate how there was a widespread consensus within British India that executive discretion and prerogative was still sometimes necessary to defend the colonial state. In The Criminal Law of India (1896), the noted legal expert John D. Mayne and former Advocate-General for the Madras Presidency, argued that it was absolutely essential for colonial authorities to suppress rioting and other disorders before they had a chance to spiral into a full-scale rebellion. ‘The governor who waits to recognize a rebellion till it looks like a war’, he wrote, ‘will probably find that he has waited too long’.10 Aside from the obvious resonances with the logic invoked by those who defended Cowan and Forsyth, it is also interesting to note that Mayne was deeply influenced by J.F. Stephen and his particular brand of legal  According to Mayne, ‘That which distinguishes a riot, which is the beginning of waging or levying war, from a riot which will end in plunder and broken heads, is the object with which it is started. That is the principle of English law, and although the application of the principles is always difficult, and has often been too severe, it seems to me that the principle itself is sound, and that there is country in which it is so necessary to enforce it as in India’: John D. Mayne, The Criminal Law of India (Madras: Higginbotham and Co., 1896), p. 363.

10

222

Conclusion: Colonial Vulnerability and the Insecurity of Empire

thought. It should also come as no surprise, then, that O’Dwyer later invoked Mayne’s legal maxim while defending his own administration’s handling of the Punjab disturbances of 1919 to the Hunter Committee.11 Executive discretion and prerogative were also central to the Murderous Outrages Act of 1867, which sought to protect the vulnerable white population along India’s violent and dangerous North-West Frontier from the murderous and ‘fanatical’ depredations of psychotic ghazi assassins. The MOA is a signal example of how concerns about the safety of the colonial regime were mobilised in order to justify the preservation of strong executive authority, notably the sovereign right to kill. Though numerous recent studies have sought to better understand the workings of everyday violence in British India and how the colonial legal regime worked to excuse, trivialise, or justify what were often brutal acts of cruelty, they have crucially overlooked the important role that fear played in mediating these responses.12 Britons in India saw themselves as a dangerous exposed minority under siege by hordes of dangerous and terrifying ‘fanatical’ criminals on all sides, and were thus much more easily able to reconcile the apparent hypocrisies of their belief in the rule of law with the need to preserve the safety and stability of the colonial regime at all costs.13 Brutal and vindictive displays of violence – whether they were the incineration of a Muslim corpse or the destruction of rebel bodies through cannonading – also become more comprehensible in this light. In addition to terrifying Indian spectators and re-asserting British authority and power in spectacular fashion, these practices were a form of colonial catharsis that allowed frustrated and frightened whites an ­outlet for venting their rage and exorcising their own fears. The durability, longevity, and adaptability of the MOA beyond the frontier demonstrate that legal codification and preservation of executive authority were hardly incompatible. Rather than limiting the powers of the state, colonial legislation often worked to strengthen the authority and range of powers available to it, as in the case of both the Defence of India Act and its subsequent iteration under the guise of Rowlatt Act. Both these laws were aimed at rooting out seditious and revolutionary movements, such as Ghadar, that threatened the safety and stability of the colonial regime. Yet despite its revolutionary potential, Ghadar’s activities in India and Punjab were relatively short-lived, and the actual threat it posed was largely chimerical. Ghadar received little support  O’Dwyer, India as I Knew It, pp. 313–14.  Bailkin, ‘The Boot and the Spleen’; Sherman, State Violence and Punishment; Kolsky, Colonial Justice. 13  See Hussain, Jurisprudence of Emergency. 11 12

Conclusion: Colonial Vulnerability and the Insecurity of Empire223

from the Punjabi masses it sought to rouse into rebellion, and unlike the sustained and pronounced campaign of revolutionary violence in Bengal, the movement was quickly crushed by colonial authorities with the help of the new emergency wartime measures. In many ways, however, the credibility of the Ghadar threat was somewhat immaterial in determining the response of colonial authorities. With its overt references to the ‘Mutiny’ of 1857, Ghadar was the incarnation of the greatest colonial nightmare imaginable. It also tapped into the fundamental insecurities and vulnerabilities that had wracked the Punjab administration since its inception in 1849 by threatening to overturn the delicate political alliance that existed between the colonial state and its potentially dangerous martial subjects. In these circumstances, the fevered and fearful imaginings of anxious Punjab administrators were more than sufficient to induce the colonial state into action. During moments of panic or crisis – like the Rebellion of 1857, the ‘Kooka outbreak’ of 1872, the First World War, or the Punjab disturbances of 1919 – the British in India regularly abandoned their highminded notions about the ‘civilising mission’, and reverted to much more brutal and pragmatic measures in order to order to ensure the stability and security of the colonial regime. It would be misleading, however, to assume that colonial anxiety and vulnerability were merely episodic in nature. Throughout this book, Punjab has been presented as more than just a peripheral case or an exception to the rule of how colonial power operated in India. Although Punjab’s strategic location along an exposed frontier region and its post-1857 military importance had an undoubtedly formative, and somewhat unique, impact on the way that colonial officials there responded to various anxieties and problems of colonial governance, this book has attempted to demonstrate how Punjab’s ­culture of insecurity was also rooted in the uncertain and contested experiences that characterised of British colonial expansion in India since its inception. Punjab’s position along a dangerous frontier, for example, brings to mind the insecure frontier ‘mindset’ in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that so heavily influenced the political thinking of men like John Malcolm, and which drove the Company into a seemingly endless series of expensive foreign wars and pacification campaigns in an attempt to secure its territory. The Punjab system also had an important influence on colonial governance in India more generally. Aside from being widely admired throughout British India, the Punjab administration was where numerous officials – men like John Lawrence, Richard Temple, Dennis Fitzpatrick, and David Petrie – began their highly successful and influential Indian

224

Conclusion: Colonial Vulnerability and the Insecurity of Empire

careers. Many others, including J.F. Stephen, were deeply impressed by the apparent strength and efficacy of the system of Punjab governance, and looked to it as an example and model for their own way of conceptualising and tackling the problems of colonial governance. Laws like the Murderous Outrages Act and the Defence of India Act, which were always touted as being ‘exceptional’ or ‘emergency’ measures, extended well beyond Punjab and also had a peculiar way of becoming permanent features of colonial rule. Indeed, the colonial state was always loath to surrender newfound powers once it had acquired them. As B.G. Horniman remarked in the wake of the Punjab disturbances of 1919, ‘repressive legislation . . . is always passed for purposes of temporary emergency and to deal with particular classes of persons, but has a habit of becoming permanent and applying itself in a generous and widespread fashion to all sorts of purposes and people’. ‘Executive authority’, he continued, ‘does not easily surrender the powers it has once wielded, nor is it easily deterred from using for one purpose powers which were ostensibly given to it by the Legislature for another, if there is nothing in the letter of the law to prevent it’.14 Moreover, while the Punjab Government’s fears about the disastrous consequences of rural discontent, mutiny, and rebellion were arguably more acute due to its role as the primary recruiting ground for the post1857 Indian Army, provincial governments across India shared similar concerns about the potential for their own populations to rebel. In 1875, Maharashtra witnessed large-scale rioting as a result of growing economic hardship, soaring peasant indebtedness, and the erosion of communal institutions in village societies.15 Both the scale and the intensity of these riots took colonial officials aback, shaking imperial confidence and serving as a reminder that unrest among even ‘naturally law-abiding’ peasants continued to pose a serious risk to colonial order.16 Four years later, the peace and tranquillity of Maharashtra was shattered again when a former British official named Vasudev Balwant Phadke raised the banner of revolution and led a gang of dispossessed, low-caste followers into an open revolt against British rule, raiding villages and threatening to attack and kill any Europeans they found.17 In 1894, the appearance of  Horniman, Amritsar and Our Duty to India, pp. 50–1.  See Ravinder Kumar, ‘The Deccan Riots of 1875’, in David Hardiman (ed.), Peasant Resistance in India 1858–1914 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 153–83; Neil Charlesworth, ‘The Myth of the Deccan Riots of 1875’, in ibid.: pp. 204–26. 16  PP, 1878 (C. 2071) LVIII.217, Report of Commission in India to Inquire into Causes of Riots in 1875 in Poona and Ahmednagar Districts of Bombay Presidency, p. 4. 17  Wilson, India Conquered, pp. 295–6. 14 15

Conclusion: Colonial Vulnerability and the Insecurity of Empire225

mysterious spots of mud on mango trees across rural Bihar in the northeast of India was interpreted as the prelude to a second ‘Mutiny’ and sent a wave of panic through colonial society.18 Commenting on the incident in 1907, the fiftieth anniversary of the Rebellion, an old India hand by the name of Captain Hume described the sheer hysteria that these mud spots had provoked: ‘A certain portion of the European community affected with nerves, including many men who ought to have known better, jumped at the conclusion that a second mutiny was on foot, and quite lost their heads. I saw men at that time white with fear who ought to have been ashamed of themselves for being affected by the panic.’19 In the south of India, continued Mappila resistance and violence culminated in the very real and spectacular 1921 Malabar Rebellion, a widespread insurgency campaign that took the colonial authorities more than six months to suppress.20 The apparent inability of British officials to effectively subdue the rebellion was not only cause for anxiety in India, but also sparked great alarm and a rancorous debate back in the imperial metropole.21 Anti-colonial resistance (whether real or imagined) was hardly confined to Punjab, and the anxieties it engendered both reflected and fed into a latent set of concerns that pervaded colonial society in India. ‘Rioting and disturbances are uncommon in India, but occur now and then, as if to warn the Government of the many dangers which lurk in so vast and varied a country’, Richard Temple observed in 1880. ‘Events of this nature shew that even in a time of general peace, the authorities must preserve a vigilant attitude and be prepared to enforce order on the instant that necessity arises’.22 Indeed, growing nationalist resistance to British rule from the late nineteenth century onwards served only to exacerbate the widespread notion that India existed in a constant state of seething unrest and crisis. During Gandhi’s first Non-Cooperation Movement between 1920 and 1922, these anxieties reached a fever pitch, combining with fears about the spread of Bolshevism, foreign aggression,

 For a detailed exploration of this event, see Wagner, ‘“Treading Upon Fires”’.  Hume continued by explaining that, ‘the Oriental, when he means serious mischief, does not talk about it. He goes about the matter in a dark and mysterious manner, and the first intimation the European gets that any trouble is brewing is a general blow up’: ‘The Unrest in India – A Chat with Captain Hume’, The Press, LXIII, no. 12819, 1 June 1907, p. 7. 20  Robert L. Hardgrave, Jr., ‘The Mappilla Rebellion, 1921: Peasant Revolt in Malabar’, Modern Asian Studies, 11:1 (1977): pp. 57–9; also, Panikkar, Against Lord and State. 21  See, for example, Hansard, HC Deb. 14 February 1922, vol. 150, cols. 865–975. 22  Temple, India in 1880, p. 199. 18 19

226

Conclusion: Colonial Vulnerability and the Insecurity of Empire

and the monumental task of post-war reconstruction and economic recovery.23 While it was the threat of large-scale unrest and open revolt that most preoccupied colonial society, fears about the existence of subversive plots, conspiracies, and secret revolutionary organisations or movements (again, real or imagined) were another important and prevailing feature across India. Concerns about ‘fanatical’ criminality and ‘murderous outrages’ along the NWF, for example, were evocative of earlier encounters with the Mappilas of Malabar and the panic induced by the exaggerated threat of thuggee in the 1830s and 1840s. These frontier ‘fanatics’ also prefigured later panics induced by the growing threat of terrorism in Bengal and other parts of India during the early twentieth century with the rise of violent revolutionary nationalism. Indeed, colonial conceptions of the category of the ‘terrorist’, as we have seen in Chapter 4, borrowed heavily from the way administrators along Punjab’s NWF attempted to frame the problem of ‘fanaticism’ and murderous outrages. The apparent unpredictability of these ‘outrages’, whether ‘political’ or ‘fanatical’, also served as a constant reminder to British officers about the precariousness of their position in India. The British also remained quite sensitive to fact that these sorts of smaller-scale acts of resistance and attacks against the colonial regime had the potential to fan the smouldering embers of anti-British feeling into a full-blown conflagration that might sweep them away.24 Thus, whether it was epitomised by the nightmare scenario of the great ‘Mutiny’ of 1857 or the spectre of murderous Indian ‘fanaticism’, Britons all across the subcontinent lived in constant fear of Indian unrest and revolt. Colonial agents measured and assessed these threats to colonial order as having varying degrees of seriousness, and responded accordingly. The danger posed by murderous ‘fanatics’ along the NWF, for example, was seen as by no means equivalent to the peril of an open rebellion, and was thus treated differently. Mutinies and rebellions often provoked spectacularly violent responses, as evidenced during the suppression of the Rebellion of 1857, the ‘Kooka outbreak’, and the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre. In these cases, the spectacle of violence was used by the British to terrify their Indian subjects into submission, while also reassuring and placating their own frightened and vengeful white countrymen.  See Rushbrook Williams, ‘A Report Prepared to Parliament in Accordance with the Requirements of the 26th Section of the Government of India Act’, PP, 1921 (202) XXVI. 291, Statement (55th) Exhibiting the Moral and Material Progress and Condition of India during the Year 1920 (Progress and Condition). 24  Temple, India in 1880, p. 120. 23

Conclusion: Colonial Vulnerability and the Insecurity of Empire227

Repressive legislation, such as the MOA or the DOI Act, on the other hand, was typically used against foes who were more elusive and difficult to uncover. In other instances, colonial administrators realised that unrestrained violence and repression were actually counterproductive to colonial security and looked to more conciliatory means of maintaining control. The Punjab Government’s attempts to cultivate Sikh loyalty through elaborate development schemes, and their acquiescence in the face of large-scale unrest during the 1907 disturbances are both examples of this. The British in India lived in a terrifying world. Surrounded and outnumbered by strangers whom they did not fully understand, dependent on the loyalty of groups they were not always sure they could trust, and confronted with various forms of resistance on a regular basis, it is no surprise that the colonial regime spent so much time fretting about its own safety. Indeed, the business of ruling over a place as vast and varied as India was never an easy or entirely orderly endeavour.25 Colonial actors, moreover, often disagreed about the best ways to manage or resolve the problems they encountered. This meant that there was no single, uniform way in which colonial officials responded to the perceived dangers that confronted them on a regular basis. For one thing, there often seems to have been a disparity between the way different levels of the colonial administration assessed and proposed to deal with potential threats. Officers situated on the front lines of colonial rule – men such as Cowan and Forsyth, Becher, and Dyer – all appear to have been much more sensitive and prone to emphasising the dangers they faced than some of their superiors. As the representatives of a colonial ruling class that was spread thin on the ground in a place as vast and strange as India, these men were understandably anxious about the ability of a handful of Britons to rule effectively and maintain control. In the event that things did go wrong for the colonial establishment, these were the individuals whose lives would have been (and sometimes were) in immediate jeopardy. As such, these men on the spot tended to advocate a bare-knuckles approach to colonial governance in which force, strength, and individual discretion were prized above all else. As we have seen, the Punjab Government and the GOI did not always agree with these officers or their methods. Their tendency to take matters into their own hands was always a potential liability for the perceived legitimacy of colonial rule. At the same time, however, both these governments feared that withdrawing their support for their subordinates  Wilson, India Conquered.

25

228

Conclusion: Colonial Vulnerability and the Insecurity of Empire

would weaken the ability of the colonial regime to maintain order and handle more serious crises, should they arise. In order to resolve this tension, both the Punjab Government and the GOI attempted to regulate and rehabilitate the most extreme excesses of their individual officers by enacting special legislation that couched executive discretion and violence within the respectable guise of the law. The Punjab Government, in particular, was an important broker in negotiating compromises between the GOI’s centralising ideals of enlightened governance and the local expediencies of colonial control. Indeed, just as its own men on the spot were prone to emphasise their exposed position in India, so too the Punjab Government was anxious to represent its own apparent vulnerability and insecurity when pressing the GOI for increased executive powers to protect its own interests, as in the case of the Punjab disturbances of 1907, the DOI Act, or its handling of the Punjab disturbances of 1919. Although there were undoubtedly cases where colonial authorities exaggerated these threats in order to expand their own realms of influence and authority – as O’Dwyer certainly did with the Ghadar menace during the First World War – there were still a great many others in which they genuinely believed in them. Indeed, while there were always differences of opinion between the imperial metropole, the Government of India, the Punjab Government, and the local men on the spot, the development of Punjab’s colonial insecurity state would not have been possible in the absence of a widespread consensus among British imperial authorities that the colonial regime in India existed in a constant state of danger. In 1935, the prolific writer and military historian Sir George MacMunn published a sensational book entitled Turmoil and Tragedy in India. In it, he provided a lurid account of numerous crises that had rocked British India in the two decades since the First World War – from the revolutionary activities of the Ghadar Party between 1915 and 1919 and the ‘Moplah’ Rebellion of 1921, to the attempted ‘Red Shirt’ rising along the NWF in 1930 and the violent communal rioting during the ‘Cawnpore Holocaust’ of 1931. Written at the tailend of a second wave of Gandhian non-cooperation protests between 1930 and 1934 and on the eve of the 1935 Government of India Act, MacMunn’s anxious portrayal of political unrest in India offers us a glimpse into the mindset of a beleaguered a colonial power. Weakened by war, economic downturn, and growing anti-colonial resistance, the interwar period was period when imperial Britain was on the back foot. MacMunn, however, did not view this current ‘crisis’ of empire and its attendant upheavals as singular or isolated events. For him, these were just the most recent examples of a ­deeply-rooted pattern of

Conclusion: Colonial Vulnerability and the Insecurity of Empire229

insurrection, strife, and anarchy that stretched back into the furthest reaches of Indian history. ‘Through the ages’, he wrote, ‘every power that has occupied the great throne of India has had to contend with underground forces of disruption and upheaval’. Looking to the earlier period of British rule, MacMunn pointed to numerous other instances in which colonial order and security had been menaced by these nefarious forces of anarchy and disorder: the ‘secret murder cult’ of the Thugs during the 1830s; the various ‘Wahhabi’ conspiracies of the 1830s, 1860s, and 1870s; the Santhal Rebellion of 1855–6 in Bengal; the so-called ‘Kooka’ outbreak of 1872 in Punjab; and, of course, the infamous ‘Mutiny’ of 1857.26 Undoubtedly sensational as they were, MacMunn’s claims were reflective of a widespread colonial culture of insecurity that prevailed in British India. The belief that India was a place of enduring danger, where the potential for rebellion, disorder, and crisis were always lurking just below the surface, was one that pervaded the colonial ­ imagination throughout the entirety of British rule, and had a profound impact on the shape of colonial governance. While literary and cultural examinations of empire have already provided fertile soil for considering a­ nxieties and ambiguities of imperialism27 and other studies have hinted at the anxious, uncertain, and contested nature of colonial rule,28 this book has sought to understand and untangle how these tensions and pressures fundamentally shaped the contours of colonial rule itself. Placing anxiety, fear, and vulnerability at the centre of the colonial story not only provides a radically different assessment of the colonial c­ ondition in India, but it also opens up new possibilities for understanding the dynamics that shaped the British Empire and European imperialism more generally. The concept of the ‘insecurity state’, for instance would find ready applications in numerous other imperial c­ ontexts – from the French in Indochina to the Portuguese in Angola – and help to explain how similarly brutal, exploitative regimes of terror were enacted and justified by other so-called ‘liberal’, ‘­civilising’ regimes. Examining the role of anxiety and vulnerability also helps complicate the idea that European imperialism was a rational and coherent project, revealing instead how it was often mediated by a range

 George MacMunn, Turmoil and Tragedy in India, 1914 and After (London: Jarrolds Publishers, 1935), pp. 5–6, 17–24.  See, for example, Siddiqi, Anxieties of Empire; Tickell, Terrorism, Insurgency and IndianEnglish Literature. 28  Wilson, Domination of Strangers; Anand A. Yang, The Limited Raj: Agrarian Relations in Colonial India, Saran District, 1793–1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). 26

27

230

Conclusion: Colonial Vulnerability and the Insecurity of Empire

of human passions and emotions.29 Again, the point in emphasising the anxieties and vulnerabilities expressed by the colonisers is not to excuse or obscure the violent and exploitative nature of colonialism, but to help explain and understand how it was that human beings were able to enact such frightening regimes and displays of brutality against their fellow men and women.

 Over the past few years, the burgeoning and multi-disciplinary field of the history of emotions has enjoyed an increased interest among scholars and historians. Several higher education institutions have established centres for the study of the history of emotions, including Queen Mary University in London, the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, and the University of Western Australia in Perth. Some notable articles and books published on this subject include: Jan Plamper, The History of Emotions: An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); Nicole Eustace et al., ‘AHR Conversation: The Historical Study of Emotions’, The American Historical Review, 117:5 (December 2012): pp. 1487–531; Dixon, Weeping Britannia.

29

Epilogue: The Insecurity State Today

Although the colonial ‘insecurity state’ that emerged in British India and Punjab was the product of the specific and contingent historical conditions that shaped the trajectory of the British Raj – not to mention the inherently uneven and exploitative power dynamics of hierarchy and domination that were integral to the European imperial project more broadly – there are a number of salient lessons we might draw from this history in order to better understand the operation of contemporary ‘insecurity states’. Pakistan and India, the Raj’s principal successor states after Independence in 1947, provide two of the most obvious and useful examples. While some have questioned the usefulness of placing too much weight on the colonial past for ongoing political, social, and economic problems in both these countries, the fact remains that both of these nations were born from the crisis of Partition and the massive political and social upheavals that this entailed. They also inherited the political, administrative, and legal machinery of the British colonial state, as well as a number of its anxiously authoritarian tendencies. Since its creation, Pakistan has been wracked by various and repeated concerns about its security and stability. As the recipient of the lion’s share of Punjab’s colonial garrison state, Pakistan has been dominated by an all-powerful military establishment that has repeatedly used internal and external security threats – both real and imagined – as a way of expanding its power and influence over the country’s political, social, and economic institutions.1 Although the larger and more powerful ­neighbour of India has traditionally been Pakistan’s greatest rival, Afghanistan – India’s putative and erstwhile ally – is also seen as a hostile power seeking to dismantle the colonially constructed borderland that still exists between these two countries. Meanwhile, the ongoing challenge posed by different ethno-linguistic and secessionist movements has also served to highlight the contested, unstable, and volatile nature of

 Ayesha Jalal, State of Martial Rule; Ahmed, The Pakistan the Garrison State.

1

231

232

Epilogue: The Insecurity State Today

Pakistani national integration and nation-building.2 Finally, persistent outbreaks of sectarian violence, terrorism, and political assassinations have all contributed to a profound and widespread sense of fear, horror, and sometimes despair within wide sectors of the Pakistani population.3 This sense of permanent insecurity and instability, in turn, has led to the emergence of a veritable siege mentality within Pakistani society, and has been used to justify a range of coercive and violent interventions on the part of the state, including the repression of civil liberties, the extrajudicial killing of political dissidents, and military coups. As a result, Pakistan has become the insecurity state par excellence, and is a place where the politics of fear continue to dominate and shape nearly all aspects of state and society. Although the situation in India has not been quite as dire as that of Pakistan, it has also been punctuated by moments of crisis and more sustained periods of insecurity which have been exploited by the state to justify the use of deeply authoritarian and repressive political practices, in the name of preserving its continued safety and security. While Indira Gandhi’s Emergency of 1975–7 presents the most striking example of how an alleged threat to national security was used to curb civil liberties and suspend the nation’s democratic institutions, the Indian state’s intolerance to political dissent has more recently been manifested with the controversial arrest of Kanhaiya Kumar and several other student leaders from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in February of 2016 for supposedly raising ‘anti-national’ slogans and fostering sedition. Though no real proof was readily available to support these allegations, this did not deter zealous police authorities from levying wild and exaggerated accusations about the depraved nature of the JNU study body and even going to elaborate lengths to manufacture evidence to portray the university as a sordid den of iniquity and the vanguard of India’s fifth column.4 In no small irony, the law that was used to charge these students was the

 Tariq Rahman, Language, Ideology and Power: Language Learning among the Muslims of Pakistan and North India (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2002); ibid., Language Politics in Pakistan (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1996). 3  Umair Jamal, ‘The Sectarian Dilemma in Pakistan’, Foreign Policy, 8 September 2015. Accessed 5 April 2016: http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/09/08/the-sectarian-­dilemma-inpakistan/; Rafia Zakaria, ‘The Terror of Fighting Terror’, Dawn, 29 July 2015. Accessed 26 August 2015: www.dawn.com/news/1196988/the-terror-of-fighting-terror; ibid., ‘The Aesthetics of Terror’, Dawn, 30 March 2016. Accessed 4 April 2016: www.dawn.com/ news/1248760/the-aesthetics-of-terror; Khurram Husain, ‘Burying the Assassin’, Dawn, 3 March 2016. Accessed 7 April 2016: www.dawn.com/news/1243156. 4  Aditya Sarkar, ‘On Framing JNU for an Imaginary Crime’, Kafila.org, 16 February 2016. Accessed 17 February 2016: https://kafila.org/2016/02/16/on-framing-jnu-for-animaginary-crime-aditya-sarkar/. 2

Epilogue: The Insecurity State Today233

same section 124-A of the Indian Penal Code that had also been used with great enthusiasm by anxious British colonial authorities seeking to curb nationalist agitation during the struggle for Independence.5 Much like the British colonial regime before it, the current Indian government appears particularly prone to bouts of panic, fevered nightmares about the existence of nefarious conspiracies ranged against it, and an absolute intolerance for any potentially menacing movement that challenges its hegemony. The politics of fear and insecurity also stretch far beyond the Indian subcontinent and are very much at the forefront of the ongoing global ‘War on Terror’. Following the attacks against the United States on 11  September 2001, the apparent vulnerability of Western nations against the depredations of terrorism has prompted numerous states to enact a vast of array of coercive and authoritarian measures – both legal and extrajudicial – in order to combat this menace. Populations are constantly bombarded with colour-coded warnings about the probability of an impending terrorist attack, and are kept in a state of semi-permanent anxiety in order to facilitate the willing surrender of their civil liberties to their governments in the vain hope that this will ensure their security in the long run. In the US, the 2001 PATRIOT Act has empowered the state to detain individuals indefinitely, and has allowed security and intelligence agencies increasingly expansive powers to conduct ­surveillance against individuals and organisations deemed potentially threatening.6 In the UK, the 2005 Prevention of Terrorism Act enabled the Home Secretary to issue ‘control orders’ to restrict individuals’ liberty until their repeal by the 2011 Terrorism Prevention and Investigation Measures Act. Australia, meanwhile, passed a similar Anti-Terrorism Act in 2005, while Canada more recently passed its own Anti-Terrorism Act in 2015,

 As Satyamurti put it in the preamble to his 1936 bill for the repeal of ‘repressive’ laws: ‘That “prince among repressive laws”, namely section 124-A of the Indian Penal Code is so widely worded, that it may be used, under a so-called system of Responsible Government, to suppress all opposition to a party in power. . . So long as criticism of an existing Government is not calculated to promote violence or public disorder, there is no reason why it should be suppressed. The recent history of political agitation in this country has demonstrated the abuse of the provision in section 144 of the Criminal Procedure Code, for purposes of suppressing legitimate political agitation. It should be confined, if it should continue on the Statute Book at all, to its legitimate purpose of preventing danger to human life or serious disturbance of public tranquillity’: NAI, Home/ Political/1935, nos. 24/6, fp. 50. 6  ‘Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism (USA PATRIOT ACT) Act of 2001’, U.S. Government and Printing Office. Accessed 4 December 2014: www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/BILLS107hr3162enr/pdf/BILLS-107hr3162enr.pdf. 5

234

Epilogue: The Insecurity State Today

also known as Bill C-51.7 All of these measures are portrayed as urgent and necessary evils that will eventually be rescinded, but if there is one resounding lesson to be drawn from Britain’s insecurity state in India, it is that states tend to guard their acquired powers quite jealously and are quite unwilling to surrender temporary expedients once the moment of crisis (real or imagined) has passed. As a result, extraordinary rendition and detention, torture, and extrajudicial killings have become commonplace, and there is no foreseeable end to this in sight. Even so-called progressive ‘liberals’ have come to the defence of this project, supporting the use of torture, the suspension of civil liberties, and the deliberate manipulation of public opinion, all in the name of defending democracy and a free way of life. The result of all this, as Mark Neocleous has argued, is that ‘the paradigm of (in)security has come to shape our imaginations and social being’.8 According to Neocleous, this contemporary obsession with security, including its open concessions to fundamental human rights and freedoms in the name of protecting the polis, has transformed it into the dominant political discourse of our day and precluded the elaboration of any sort of alternate politics. In many ways, then, we now seem mired in the same state of permanent war and anxious emergency that British officials so forcefully insisted existed in colonial India. The question remains, however, whether we will attempt to move beyond brute authoritarianism and coercion, or whether we will continue to allow our politics to be shaped by fear, emergency, and violence.

 ‘An Act to Amend the Law Relating to Terrorist Act, and for Other Purposes’, no. 127, 2005, Australian Government. Accessed 3 August 2016: www.legislation.gov.au/Details/ C2005A00127; ‘An Act to Enact the Security of Canada Information Sharing Act and the Secure Air Travel Act, to Amend the Criminal Code, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service Act and the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act and to make Related and Consequential Amendments to other Acts’, Parliament of Canada. Accessed 3 August 2016: www.parl.gc.ca/HousePublications/Publication.aspx?DocId’8056977&File’4. 8  Mark Neocleous, Critique of Security (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008), p. 3. 7

Bibliography

Newspapers & Periodicals Black & White The Bombay Times and Journal of Commerce The Calcutta Review The Civil and Military Gazette Colburn’s United Service Magazine Dawn The Englishman The Friend of India The London Daily News The London Gazette The Morning Post The Pall Mall Gazette The Press The Spectator The Times The Times of India

Parliamentary Papers Continuation of Papers Relating to the Punjab. Command Papers: Accounts and Papers; 1849 (1075) XLI. Correspondence between the Government of India and the Secretary of State for India on the Report of Lord Hunter’s Committee. Command Papers: Accounts and Papers; 1920 (Cmd. 705) XXXIV.649. Correspondence Relating to Kooka Outbreak. House of Commons Papers: Accounts and Papers; 1872 (356) XLV.645. Disturbances in the Punjab: Statement by Brig.-General R.E. Dyer, C.B. Command Papers: Accounts and Papers; 1920 (Cmd. 771) XXXIV.677. East India (European and Native Troops). Command Papers: Accounts and Papers; 1867 (500) LII.459. First Report from the Select Committee on Indian Territories; Together with the Minutes of Evidence, and Appendix. House of Commons Papers: Reports of Committees; 1852–53 (426) XXVII.1. Hansard House of Commons Debates. 235

236 Bibliography Minute by Marquis of Dalhousie, February 1856, Reviewing His Administration in India, 1848–56. House of Commons Papers: Accounts and Papers; 1856 (245) XLV.107. Minutes of Evidence Taken before the Committee of the Whole House, and the Select Committee on the Affairs of the East India Company. House of Commons Papers: Reports of Committees; 1812–13 (122) VII.1. Observations by C. Grant on the State of Society among Asiatic Subjects of Great Britain, 1792. House of Commons Papers: Accounts and Papers; 1812–13 (282) X.31.421. Orders Issued by Court of Directors Regarding Castes of Hindoos from Which Native Army Is Recruited. House of Commons Papers: Accounts and Papers; (129) XLIII.123. Papers Relating to Military Operations in Afghanistan. House of Commons Papers: Accounts and Papers; 1843 (31) [428] XXXVII.1. Papers Relating to Resident Europeans and Police in Bengal, and to Missionaries in India. House of Commons Papers: Accounts and Papers; 1812–13 (142)VIII.275.683. Papers Relating to the Punjab, 1847–1849. Command Papers: Accounts and Papers; 1849 (1071) XLI.1. Papers Relating to the Resignation by General Sir Charles Napier of the Office of Commander-in-Chief in India. House of Commons Papers: Accounts and Papers; 1854 (80) XLVII.197. Papers Relating to the War in Afghanistan. House of Commons Papers: Accounts and Papers; 1840 (9) XXXVII.137. Report of Commission in India to Inquire into Causes of Riots in 1875 in Poona and Ahmednagar Districts of Bombay Presidency. Command Papers: Reports of Commissioners; 1878 (C. 2071) LVIII. Statement (55th) Exhibiting the Moral and Material Progress and Condition of India during the Year 1920 (Progress and Condition). House of Commons Papers: Accounts and Papers; 1921 (202) XXVI.291. Statement by Brig.-General R.E. Dyer, C.B. (Punjab Disturbances). Command Papers: Accounts and Papers; 1920 (Cmd. 771) XXXIV.677.

British Library, India Office Collections, London, UK (BL, IOR) India Office Records H L/MIL L/PJ P P/series V

Home Miscellaneous Series, c. 1600–c. 1900 Military Department Records, 1708–1959 Public and Judicial Department Records, 1795–1950 Proceedings and Consultations of the Government of India and of the Presidencies and Provinces, 1702–1945 Punjab Government Proceedings, 1848–1942 India Office: Official Publications, c. 1760–1957

European Manuscripts Catalogue of Hostile Oriental Propaganda Pamphlets, Abstracts of Some of the Pamphlets (1914–1918), Translations of the ‘Ghadar’ (1915–1917), and a Catalogue of Hostile Oriental Propaganda Pamphlets, Mss Eur E288

Bibliography237 Charles Hardinge Correspondence, Mss Eur Photo 473 Charles Wood Collection, Mss Eur F78 Dunlop Smith Collection, Mss Eur F166 Frederick Roberts Papers, Mss Eur D734 Henry Lawrence Papers, Mss Eur F85 Henry Maine Papers, Mss Eur C179 Henry Seymour Rawlinson Papers, Mss Eur D605 James Rawlins Papers, Mss Eur F258 John Cam Hobhouse Papers, Mss Eur F213 John Lawrence Collections, Mss Eur F90 John Morley Papers, Mss Eur D573 John Thompson Papers, Mss Eur F137 Lord Mayo Papers, Mss Eur B380f

National Archives, Kew, London, UK (NA) FO

Foreign Office Records

National Archives of India, New Delhi, India (NAI) Home Department Police Revenue Judicial Public Foreign Department Proceedings Frontier Political Revenue Secret Legislative Department Proceedings Military Department

Punjab State Archives, Chandigarh, India (PSA) Punjab Civil Secretariat Records (1890–1915)

Official Government Publications Assessment Report of the Amritsar District, 1891–1893. PSA, CSR/no. 10. Assessment Report of the Amritsar District, 1912–13. Lahore: Punjab Government Press, 1914. PSA, CSR/no. 32. Assessment Report of the Lahore District, 1891. PSA, CSR/no.13. Assessment Report of the Lahore District, 1914. Lahore: Punjab Government Press, 1914. PSA, CSR/no. 36.

238 Bibliography Barkley, D.G. The Non-Regulation Law of the Punjab. Lahore: Punjab Printing Company, 1871. BL, IOR, V/5507. Circular Orders Issued in the Judicial Department by the Board of Administration for the Affairs of the Punjab, from 8 May 1849 to 10 Feb 1853. Lahore: Chronicle Press, 1853. BL, IOR, V/27/140/46. Correspondence on Moplah Outrages in Malabar, for the Years 1849–53. 2 vols. Madras: The United Scottish Press, 1863. BL, IOR, V/27/262/20. Cust, R. Manual for the Guidance of Revenue Officers in the Punjab. Lahore: Koh-I-Noor Press, 1866. Davies, R.H. and Blyth, M. Report on the Revised Settlement of the Umritsur, Sowrian, and Turun Tarun Purgunnuahs of the Umritsur. Lahore: Hope Press, 1860. BL, IOR, V/27/314/459. Douie, J.M. Punjab Settlement Manual. 2nd ed. Lahore: Civil and Military Gazette Press, 1909. BL, IOR, V/27/311/430.   Census of India 1921,Vol 15: Punjab and Delhi, Pt. 1: Report, by L. Middleton and S.M. Jacob. Lahore: Civil and Military Gazette Press, 1923. Punjab Government. General Reports for the Administration of the Punjab. Lahore, 1854–1878. Grant, J.A. Final Report on the Revision of Settlement (1888-1893) of the Amritsar District in the Punjab. Lahore: The Civil and Military Gazette Press, 1893. BL, IOR, V/27/314/460. Ker, J.C. Political Trouble in India, 1907–1917. Calcutta: Superintendent Government Printing, 1917. Legislative Assembly Debates: Official Report, Vol. II, 19 February-11 March, 1931. Simla: GOI Press, 1931. Legislative Assembly Debates, 9–23 April 1936. Vol. 5. New Delhi: Government of India Press, 1936. Minutes by Sir H.S. Maine, 1862–69: with a Note on Indian Codification. Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, India, 1892. IOR: V/3130. Punjab Disturbances, April 1919: Compiled from the Civil and Military Gazette. 2nd ed. Lahore: The Civil and Military Gazette Press, 1919. Report of the Disorders Inquiry Committee 1919–20. Calcutta: Government of India Press, 1920. Report of the Committee Appointed by the Government of India to Investigate the Disturbances in the Punjab, Etc. London: His Majestys Stationery Office, 1920. Report of the Sedition Committee, 1918. Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1918. Statement of Fanatical Outrages in the North-West Frontier Province and Baluchistan. Simla: Intelligence Branch, Quarter Master Generals Deptartment, 1905. BL, IOR, L/PS/20/203. Stephen, J.F. Minute on the Administration of Justice in British India. Calcutta: Home Secretariat Press, 1872. BL, IOR, V/23/28. Temple, R. and Davies, R.H. Report Showing the Relations of the British Government with the Tribes of the North-West Frontier of the Punjab from Annexation in 1849 to the Close of 1855; and Continuation of the Same to August 1864. Lahore: Punjab Government Press, 1865. BL, IOR, V/27/273/1/1.

Bibliography239 Disorders Inquiry (Hunter) Committee 1919–20. 7 vols. Calcutta: His Majestys Stationery Office, 1920. Theobold, W. The Legislative Acts of the Governor General of India in Council, from 1834 to the End of 1867; with an Analytical Abstract Prefixed to Each Act. 5 vols. Calcutta: Thacker, Spink & Co., 1868. BL, IOR, V/8/119. Williams, W.P. The Acts of the Legislative Council of India Relating to the Madras Presidency from 1848 to 1855. Madras: The Church of Scotland Mission Press, 1856. BL, IOR, V/4589.

Gazetteers Gazetteer of the Gujranwala District, 1893–94. Rev. ed. Lahore: Civil and Military Gazette Press, 1895. BL, IOR, V/27/67/14. Punjab District Gazetteers, vol. 7A: Ambala District, 1923–24. Lahore: Superintendent, Government Printing, Punjab, 1925. BL, IOR, V/27/67/51. Punjab District Gazetteers, vol. 20A: Amritsar District, 1914. Lahore: Civil and Military Gazette Press, 1914. BL, IOR V/27/67/55. Punjab District Gazetteers, vol. 30A: Lahore District, 1916. Lahore: Superintendent, Government Printing, Punjab, 1916. BL, IOR, V/27/67/144.

Printed Sources Before 1947 A Cavalry Officer. Military Service and Adventures in the Far East: Including Sketches of the Campaigns against the Afghans in 1839, and the Sikhs in 1845–56. 2 vols. London: Charles Ollier, 1847. Arbuthnot, A.J., ed. Major-General Sir Thomas Munro, Bart., K.C.B., Governor of Madras: Selections from His Minutes and Other Official Writings. London: C. Kegan Paul & Co., 1881. Baird, J.G.A., ed. Private Letters of the Marquess of Dalhousie. Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1910. Barstow, A.E. Recruiting Handbook for the Indian Army: Sikhs. Calcutta: Government of India Press, 1898. Blakiston, J. Twelve Years’ Military Adventure in Three Quarters of the Globe. 2 vols. London: Henry Colburn, 1829. Briggs, J. Letters Addressed to a Young Person in India. London: John Murray, 1828. Browne, J. India Tracts: Containing a Description of the Jungle Terry Districts, Their Revenues, Trade and Government: with a Plan for the Improvement of Them. Also an History of the Origin and Progress of the Sicks. London: Logographic Press, 1788. Bruce, R.I. The Forward Policy and Its Results; or Thirty-Five Years Work Amongst the Tribes on Our North-Western Frontier of India. London: Longman, Green, and Co., 1900. Burnes, A. Travels into Bokhara; Being the Account of a Journey from India to Cabool, Tartary, and Persia. 3 vols. London: John Murray, 1834. Churchill, W.S. The Story of the Malakand Field Force: An Episode of Frontier War. London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1899.

240 Bibliography Cunningham, J. D. A History of the Sikhs, from the Origin of the Nation to the Battles of the Sutlej. London: John Murray, 1849. Curry, J.C. The Indian Police. London: Faber & Faber Limited, 1932. Cust, R. N. Memoirs of Past Years of a Septuagenarian. Hertford: Stephen Austin and Sons, 1899. Robert, N.C. Linguistic and Oriental Essays: Written from the Year 1840 to 1898. 2 vols. London: Luzac & Co., 1898. Dow, A. The History of Hindostan; from the Earliest Account of Time, to the Death of Akbar. 3 vols. London: T. Becket and P.A. de Hondt, 1768; 1772. Durand, M. Life of the Right Hon. Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall. Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1913. Dayal, H. Forty-Four Months in Germany and Turkey: February 1915 to October 1918. London: P.S. King & Son Ltd., 1920. de Lacy Evans, G. On the Practicability of an Invasion of British India; and of the Commercial and Financial Prospects and Resources of the Empire. London: J.M. Richardson, 1829. Edwardes, H. Year on the Punjab Frontier in 1848–49. 2 vols. 2nd ed. London: Richard Bentley, 1851. Elphinstone, M. The History of India. 2 vols. London: John Murray, 1841. Falcon, R.W. Handbook on Sikhs: For the Use of Regimental Officers. Allahabad: The Pioneer Press, 1896. Forster, E.M. Abinger Harvest. London: Edward Arnold & Co., 1936.   A Passage to India. London: Edward Arnold, 1924. Forster, G. A Journey from Bengal to England, through the Northern Part of India, Afghanistan, and Persia and into Russia, by the Caspian Sea. London: R. Faulder, 1798. Forsyth, E., ed. Autobiography and Reminiscences of Sir Douglas Forsyth, C.B., K.C.S.I., F.R.G.S. London: Bentley and Sons, 1887. Gleig, G.R., ed. The Life of Major-General Sir Thomas Munro, Bart and K.C.B., Late Governor of Madras. 2 vols. London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, 1830. Grant, J. Cassell’s Illustrated History of India. 2 vols. London: Cassell, Petter & Galpin, 1880. Griffin, L. Ranjit Singh. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1892. Gurwood, J., ed. The Dispatches of Field Marshal the Duke of Wellington During His Various Campaigns in India, Denmark, Portugal, Spain, the Low Countries, and France, From 1799 to 1818. 13 vols. London: John Murray, 1837. Hodgson, J.S. Opinions on the Indian Army. London: W.H. Allen & Co., 1857. Hogg, J.W. Addresses Delivered by Sir James Weir Hogg, Bar., M.P., Chairman of the East-India Company, to the Students of the East-India College, at Haileybury, and to the Cadets at the Military Seminary, at Addiscombe, on the Closing of the Half-Yearly Terms, 1846. London: J. & H. Cox, 1846. Horniman, B.G. Amritsar and Our Duty to India. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1920. Hunter, W.W. A Life of the Earl of Mayo, Fourth Viceroy of India. London: Smith, Elder, & Co., 1875.   The Annals of Rural Bengal. 3 vols. London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 1868; 1872. Isemonger, F.C. and Slattery, J. An Account of the Ghadr Conspiracy (1913–1915). Lahore: Superintendent, Government Printing, 1919.

Bibliography241 Kaye, J.W. Lives of Indian Officers. 1867. 2 vols. London: Strahan and Co. Publishers, 1869.   The Administration of the East India Company: A History of Indian Progress. London: Richard Bentley, 1853.  ed. The Life and Correspondence of Major-General Sir John Malcolm, G.C.B. 2 vols. London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1856. Kaye, J.W. and Malleson, G.B. Kayes and Mallesons History of the Indian Mutiny of 1857–8. 6 vols. London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1914. Kipling, R. In Black and White. New York: The Lovell Company, 1899.   Kim. 1901. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.   Plain Tales from the Hills. 1888. London: Macmillan and Co., 1920.   Rewards and Fairies. London: Macmillan and Co., 1910. Lawrence, H. Adventures of an Officer in the Service of Runjeet Singh. 2 vols. London: Henry Colburn, 1845.   Essays, Military and Political, Written in India. London: W. H. Allen & Co., 1859. Macauliffe, M.A. The Sikh Religion: Its Gurus, Sacred Writings and Authors. 6 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1909. Mackintosh, R.J., ed. Memoirs of the Life of the Right Honourable Sir James Mackintosh. 2 vols. London: Edward Moxon, 1836. MacMunn, G.F. The Armies of India. London: Adam and Charles Black, 1911.   The Martial Races of India. London: Sampson Low, Marston and Co., 1933.   Turmoil and Tragedy in India, 1914 and After. London: Jarrolds Publishers, 1935. Maitland, J.C. Letters from Madras, During the Years 1836–1839. London: John Murray, 1846. Malcolm, J. Sketch of the Political History of India from the Introduction of Mr. Pitts Bill, A.D. 1784, to the Present Date. London: William Miller, 1811.   Sketch of the Sikhs; a Singular Nation, Who Inhabit the Provinces of the Penjab, Situated between the Rivers Jumna and Indus. London: John Murray, 1812.   The Political History of India, from 1784 to 1823. 2 vols. London: John Murray, 1826. Malleson, G.B. The Decisive Battles of India from 1746 to 1849 Inclusive. London: W.H. Allen, 1883.   The Mutiny of the Bengal Army: An Historical Narrative by One Who Has Served under Sir Charles Napier. 2 vols. London: Bosworth and Harrison, 1857. Masson, C. Narrative of Various Journeys in Balochistan, Afghanistan, and the Panjab. 3 vols. London: Richard Bentley, 1842. Mill, J. The History of British India. 3 vols. London: Baldwin, Cradock, and Joy, 1817. Mayne, J.D. The Criminal Law of India. Madras: Higginbotham and Co., 1896. Mohan, P. An Imaginary Rebellion and How It Was Suppressed: An Account of the Punjab Disorders and the Working of Martial Law. Lahore: Khosla Bros., 1920. Napier, C. Defects, Civil and Military of the Indian Government. London: Charles Westerton, 1853.   Remarks on Military Law and the Punishment of Flogging. London: T. and W. Boone, 1837. Napier, W.F.P. The Life and Opinions of General Sir Charles James Napier. 4 vols. London: John Murray, 1857.

242 Bibliography O’Dwyer, M. India As I Knew It, 1885–1925. London: Constable, 1925. O’Malley, L.S.S. The Indian Civil Service 1601–1930. London: John Murray, 1931. Orme, R. A History of the Military Transactions of the British Nation in Indostan: From the Year MDCCXLV. To Which Is Prefixed a Dissertation on the Establishments Made by Mahomedan Conquerors in Indostan. 1763. 2 vols. London: John Nourse, 1778. Orwell, G. Burmese Days. 1934. London: Penguin, 2009.   ‘Shooting an Elephant’. 1936. In G. Bott, ed., George Orwell: Selected Writings. London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1958, pp. 25–33. Osborne, W.G. The Court and Camp of Runjeet Singh. London: Henry Colburn, 1840. Prinsep, H.T. History of the Punjab, and of the Rise, Progress and Present Condition of the Sect and Nation of the Sikhs. 2 vols. London: W.H. Allen & Co., 1846. Raleigh, T. Lord in India Curzon: Being a Selection from His Speeches As Viceroy & Governor-General of India, 1898–1905. London: Macmillan and Co., 1906. Ranor, A. Political Diaries of Lieutenant Reynell G. Taylor, Mr. P. Sandys Melvill, Pandit Kunahya Lal, Mr. P.A. vans Agnew, Lieutenant J. Nicholson, Mr. L. Bowring and Mr A.H. Cocks, 1847–1849. Allahabad: The Pioneer Press, 1915. Raynor, A., ed. Political Diaries of Lieut. H.B. Edwardes, Assistant to the Resident at Lahore 1847–1849. Allahabad: The Pioneer Press, 1911. Report of the Commissioners Appointed by the Punjab Sub-Committee of the Indian National Congress. Lahore: K. Santanam, 1920. Savarkar, V.D. The Indian War of Independence. London: s.n., 1909. Seeley, J.R. The Expansion of England:Two Courses of Lectures. London: Macmillan, 1883. Sleeman, W.H. Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official. 2 vols. London: J. Hatchard and Son, 1844. Smith, B.R. Life of Lord Lawrence. 6th ed. 2 vols. London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1885. Stephen, J.F. ‘Foundations of the Government of India’. Nineteenth Century, vol. 14, no. 80 (October 1883): 541–68.   ‘Legislation under Lord Mayo’. In W.W. Hunter, ed., A Life of the Earl of Mayo, Fourth Viceroy of India. London: Smith, Elder, & Co., 1875. pp. 143–226. Stephen, L. The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I., A Judge of the High Court of Justice. London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1895. Strachey, J. India: Its Administration and Progress. 1888. 3rd ed. London: Macmillan and Co., 1903. Taylor, P.M. A Student’s Manual of the History of India: From the Earliest Period to the Present. London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1870.   Confessions of a Thug. With a preface by N. Mirsky. 1839. Reprint. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986. Temple, R. India in 1880. London: John Murray, 1880. Tegart, C. Terrorism in India: A Speech Delivered before the Royal Empire Society. London: The Royal Empire Society, 1933. Thackwell, E.J. Narrative of the Second Seikh War in 1848–49. London: Richard Bentley, 1851.

Bibliography243 Thompson, E. The Other Side of the Medal. London: Leonard & Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press, 1925. Thorburn, S.S. The Punjab in Peace and War. Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1904. Thornton, E. A Gazetteer of the Countries Adjacent to India on the Northwest; Including Sinde, Afghanistan, Beloochistan, the Punjab, and the Neighbouring States. 2 vols. London: W.H. Allen & Co., 1844. Tod, J. Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan; or the Central and Western Rajput States of India. In W. Crooke, ed., 3 vols. 1829–32. London: Oxford University Press, 1920. Trevelyan, G.O. The Competition Wallah. London: Macmillan and Co., 1864. Walrond, T., ed. Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin: Governor of Jamaica, Governor-General of Canada, Envoy to China, Viceroy of India. London: John Murray, 1872. Wilks, M. Historical Sketches of the South of India in an Attempt to Trace the History of Mysore; from the Origin of the Hindoo Government of the State, to the Extinction of the Mohammedan Dynasty in 1799. 3 vols. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1810–17.

Printed Sources After 1947 Agamben, G. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. D. Heller-Roazen, trans. 1995. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998.   State of Exception. K. Attell, trans. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Ahmed, I. The Pakistan Garrison State: Origins, Evolutions, Consequences, 1947–2011. Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2013. Alam, M. The Crisis of Empire in Mughal North India: Awadh and the Punjab, 1707–48. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986. Alavi, S. The Sepoys and the Company: Tradition and Transition in Northern India 1770–1830. 1995. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006. Ali, I. ‘The Punjab and the Retardation of Nationalism’. In D.A. Low, ed., The Political Inheritance of Pakistan. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991. pp. 29–52.   The Punjab under Imperialism, 1885–1947. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988. Allen, C. Soldier Sahibs:The Men Who Made the North-West Frontier. London: John Murray, 2000. Anderson, C. The Indian Uprising of 1857–8: Prisons, Prisoners and Rebellion. London: Anthem Press, 2007. Anooshahr, A. The Ghazi Sultans and the Frontiers of Islam: A Comparative Study of the late Medieval and Early Modern Periods. London: Routledge, 2009. Arnold, D. Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in NineteenthCentury India. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993.   ‘Islam, the Mappilas and Peasant Revolt in Malabar’. The Journal of Peasant Studies, vol. 9, no. 4 (1982): 255–65.   ‘The Poison Panics in British India’. In H. Fischer-Tiné, ed., Anxieties, Fear and Panic in Colonial Settings: Empires on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. Houndmills: Palgrave, 2017. pp. 49–71.

244 Bibliography   Police Power and Colonial Rule: Madras 1859–1947. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986. Bailkin, J. ‘The Boot and the Spleen: When Was Murder Possible in British India?’ Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 48, no. 2 (2006): 463–93. Bajwa, F.S. Military System of the Sikhs During the Period 1799–1849. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1964. Ballantyne, T. Between Colonialism and Diaspora: Sikh Cultural Formations in an Imperial World. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. Banga, I. Agrarian System of the Sikhs: Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Century. New Delhi: Manohar, 1978. Barrier, N.G. ‘The Punjab Disturbances of 1907: The Response of the British Government to Agrarian Unrest’. Modern Asian Studies, vol. 1, no. 4 (July 1967): 353–83. Bates, C., ed. Mutiny at the Margins: New Perspectives on the Indian Uprising of 1857. 6 vols. New Delhi: Sage, 2013–14. Bayly, C.A. Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.   Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars: North Indian Society in the Age of British Expansion, 1770–1870. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.   ‘The British Military-Fiscal State and Indigenous Resistance, India 1750– 1820’. In L. Stone, ed., An Imperial State at War. London: Routledge, 1994. pp. 322–54. Beames, J. Memoirs of a Bengal Civilian. London: Chatto & Windus, 1961. Benton, L. A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Blyth, R.J. The Empire of the Raj: India, Eastern Africa and the Middle East, 1858–1947. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Bryant, G.J. The Emergence of British Power in India, 1600–1784. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2013. Bott, G., ed. George Orwell: Selected Writings. London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1958. Bose, P. and Lyons, L. ‘Dyer Consequences: The Trope of Amritsar, Ireland, and the Lessons of the “Minimum” Force Debate’, boundary 2, vol. 26, no. 2 (1999): 199–229. Breckenridge, C.A. and van der Veer, P., eds. Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993. Brewer, J. The Sinews of Power: War, Money, and the English State, 1688–1783. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988. Caplan, L. ‘Martial Gurkhas: The Persistence of Discourse on Race’. In P. Robb, ed., The Concept of Race in South Asia. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995. pp. 260–81. Chakravarty, G. The Indian Mutiny and the British Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Chandavarkar, R. Imperial Power and Popular Politics: Class, Resistance and the State in India, c. 1850–1950. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Chandra, B., Mukherjee, M., Panikkar, K.N., Mahajan, S., and Mukherjee, A., eds. India’s Struggle for Independence, 1857–1947. New Delhi: Penguin, 1989.

Bibliography245 Charlesworth, N. ‘The Myth of the Deccan Riots of 1875’. In D. Hardiman, ed., Peasant Resistance in India 1858–1914. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992. pp. 204–26. Chatterjee, P. The Black Hole of Empire: History of a Global Practice of Power. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012. Choudhury, D.K.L. ‘Sinews of Panic and the Nerves of Empire: The Imagined State’s Entanglement with Information Panic, India c. 1800–1912’. Modern Asian Studies, vol. 38, no. 4 (October 2004): 965–1002. Cohen, S.P. The Indian Army: Its Contribution to the Development of a Nation. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990. Cohn, B. Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996. Collett, N. The Butcher of Amritsar: Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer. London: Continuum, 2006. Colley, L. Captives: Britain, Empire and the World, 1600–1850. London: Pimlico, 2003. Collingham, E. Imperial Bodies, The Physical Experience of the Raj, c. 1800–1947. Cambridge: Polity, 2001. Comaroff, J.L. and Comaroff, J. ‘Law and Disorder in the Postcolony: An Introduction’. In J.L. Comaroff and J. Comaroff, eds. Law and Disorder in the Postcolony. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2006. pp. 1–56. Condos, M. ‘Licence to Kill: The Murderous Outrages Act and the Rule of Law in Colonial India, 1867–1925’. Modern Asian Studies, vol. 50, no. 2 (2016): 479–517.   ‘“Fanaticism” and the Politics of Resistance along the North-West Frontier of British India’. Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 58, no. 3 (2016): 717–45. Cooper, R.G.S. The Anglo-Maratha Campaigns and the Contest for India: The Struggle for Control of the South Asian Military Economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Dalrymple, W. Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan. London: Bloomsbury, 2013.   The Last Mughal:The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi 1857. London: Bloomsbury, 2006. Darwin, J. The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System 1830–1970. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.   Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain. London: Allen Lane, 2012. den Otter, S. ‘“A Legislating Empire”: Victorian Political Theorists, Codes of Law, and Empire’. In D. Bell, ed., VictorianVisions of Global Order: Empire and International Relations in Nineteenth-Century Political Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. pp. 89–112.   ‘Law, Authority, and Colonial Rule’. In D. Peers and N. Gooptu, eds., India and the British Empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. pp. 168–90. Dewey, C. ‘Some Consequences of Military Expenditure in British India: The Case of the Upper Sind Sagar Doab, 1849–1947’. In C. Dewey, ed., Arrested Development in India. New Delhi: Manohar, 1988. pp. 93–169. Dixon, T. Weeping Britannia: Portrait of a Nation in Tears. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.

246 Bibliography Dodson, M.S. Orientalism, Empire, and National Culture: India, 1770–1880. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Domin, D. India in 1857–59: A Study of the Role of the Sikhs in the People’s Uprising. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1977. Eustace, N., Lean, E., Livingston, J., Plamper, J., Reddy, W.M., and Rosenwein, B.H. ‘AHR Conversation: The Historical Study of Emotions’. The American Historical Review, vol. 117, no. 5 (December 2012): 1487–531. Farooqui, M. Besieged:Voices from Delhi 1857. Delhi: Penguin, 2010. Fein, H. Imperial Crime and Punishment:The Massacre at Jallianwala Bagh and British Judgment, 1919–1920. Honolulu: The University of Hawaii Press, 1977. Ferguson, N. Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World. London: Allen Lane, 2003. Firestone, R. Jihad: The Origin of Holy War in Islam. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Fischer-Tiné, H., ed. Anxieties, Fear and Panic in Colonial Settings: Empires on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. Houndmills: Palgrave, 2017.   ‘Indian Nationalism and the “World Force”: Transnational and Diasporic Dimensions of the Indian Freedom Movement on the Eve of the First World War’. Journal of Global History, vol. 2, no. 3 (November 2007): 325–44. Förster, S. Die Mächtigen Diener der East India Company: Ursachen und Hintergründe der britischen Expansionspolitik in Südasien, 1793–1819. Stuttgard: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1992. Foucault, M. The History of Sexuality Vol. 1:The Will to Knowledge. R. Hurley, trans. London: Penguin Books, 1990. Fox, R.G. Lions of the Punjab: Culture in the Making. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1985. Freitag, S.B. ‘Crime in the Social Order of Colonial North India’. Modern Asian Studies, vol. 25, no. 2 (1991): 227–61. Gilmartin, D. Blood and Water: The Indus River Basin in Modern History. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2015.   ‘The Strange Career of the Rule of Law in Colonial Punjab’. Pakistan Vision, vol. 10, no. 2 (2009): 1–21. Gilmour, D. Curzon. London: John Murray, 1994.   The Ruling Caste: Imperial Lives in the Victorian Raj. London: Pimlico, 2007. Gilroy, P. After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? Abingdon: Routledge, 2004. Gordon, S. Marathas, Marauders, and State Formation in Eighteenth-Century India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994. Gordon, C. and Peter, M., eds. The Foucault Effect. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. Green, N. Islam and the Army in Colonial India: Sepoy Religion in the Service of Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Grewal, J.S. Contesting Interpretations of the Sikh Tradition. New Delhi: Manohar, 1998.   The Sikhs of the Punjab. 1990. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Grewal, J.S. and Banga, I. ‘The Jallianwala Bagh Tragedy: The Official Attitude and Its Significance’. In V.N. Datta and S. Settar, eds., Jallianwala Bagh Massacre. Delhi: Indian Council of Historical Research, 2000. pp. 114–23.

Bibliography247 Guha, R. Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997.   Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency. Bombay: Oxford University Press, 1983.   ‘Not at Home in Empire’. Critical Inquiry, vol. 23, no. 3, Front Lines/Border Posts (Spring, 1997): 483–93. Hack, K. ‘Imperialism and Decolonisation in Asia: Colonial Forces and British World Power’. In K. Hack and T. Rettig, eds., Colonial Armies in Asia. London: Routledge, 2006. pp. 239–65. Hagiioannu, A. The Man Who Would Be Kipling: The Colonial Fiction and the Frontiers of Exile. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Haines, D. Building the Empire, Building the Nation: Development, Legitimacy, and Hydro-Politics in Sind, 1919–1969. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Hardgrave, R.L., Jr. ‘The Mappilla Rebellion, 1921: Peasant Revolt in Malabar’. Modern Asian Studies, vol. 11, no. 1 (1977): 57–9. Harrington, J. Sir John Malcolm and the Creation of British India. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Heehs, P. The Bomb in Bengal: The Rise of Revolutionary Terrorism in India, 1900–1910. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993.   ‘Foreign Influences on Bengali Revolutionary Terrorism 1902–1908’. Modern Asian Studies, vol. 28, no. 3 (July 1994): 533–56. Herbert, C. War of No Pity: The Indian Mutiny and Victorian Trauma. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008. Hoover, J.W. Men Without Hats: Dialogue, Discipline and Discontent in the Madras Army, 1806–1807. New Delhi: Manohar, 2007. Hopkins, B.D. ‘Jihad on the Frontier: A History of Religious Revolt on the NorthWest Frontier, 1800–1947’. History Compass, vol. 7, no. 6 (2009): 1459–69.   ‘The Frontier Crimes Regulation and Frontier Governmentality’. The Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 74, no. 2 (2015): 1–22. Hopkins, B.D. and Marsden, M. Fragments of the Frontier. London: Hurst & Company, 2011. Hussain, N. The Jurisprudence of Emergency: Colonialism and the Rule of Law. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2003. Ingram, E. ‘Approaches to the Great Game in Asia’, Middle Eastern Studies, vol. 18, no. 4 (October 1982): 449–57.   In Defence of British India: Great Britain in the Middle East, 1775–1842. London: Frank Cass, 1984. Jalal, A. Partisans of Allah: Jihad in South Asia. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008.   The State of Martial Rule: The Origins of Pakistans Political Economy of Defence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. James, L. Raj: The Making and Unmaking of British India. London: Little, Brown and Company, 1997. Johnson, Gordon. ‘India and Henry Maine’. In A. Diamond, ed., The Victorian Achievement of Sir Henry Maine. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. pp. 376–88. Kapila, S. ‘Race Matters: Orientalism and Religion, India and Beyond c. 1770–1880’. Modern Asian Studies, vol. 41, no. 3 (2007): 471–513.

248 Bibliography Kapur, R.A. Sikh Separatism: The Politics of Faith. London: Allen & Unwin, 1986. Kennedy, D. The Magic Mountains: Hill Stations and the British Raj. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996. Kenny, J.T. ‘Climate, Race, and Imperial Authority: The Symbolic Landscape of the British Hill Station in India’. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, vol. 85, no. 4 (December 1995): 684–714. Khilnani, N.M. British Power in the Punjab 1839–1858. Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1975. Killingray, D. ‘Guardians of Empire’. In D. Killingray and D. Omissi, eds., Guardians of Empire: The Armed Forces of the Colonial Powers c. 1700–1964. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999. pp. 1–24. Kolff, D.H.A. Naukar, Rajput and Sepoy: The Ethnohistory of the Military Labour Market in Hindustan, 1450–1850. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Kolsky, E. ‘Codification and the Rule of Colonial Difference: Criminal Procedure in British India’. Law and History Review, vol. 23, no. 3 (2005): 631–83.   Colonial Justice in British India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.   ‘The Colonial Rule of Law and the Legal Regime of Exception: Frontier “Fanaticism” and State Violence in British India’. American Historical Review, vol. 120, no. 4 (October 2015): 1218–46. Kostal, R.W. A Jurisprudence of Power: Victorian Empire and the Rule of Law. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Kumar, R. ‘The Deccan Riots of 1875’. In D. Hardiman, ed., Peasant Resistance in India 1858–1914. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992. pp. 53–183. Lambrick, H.T. Sir Charles Napier and Sind. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952. Lee, H. Brothers in the Raj: The Lives of John and Henry Lawrence. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Lees, J. ‘A “Tranquil Spectator”: The District Official and the Practice of Local Government in Late Eighteenth-Century Bengal’. Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, vol. 38, no. 1 (March 2010): 1–19. Littlewood, R. Pathologies of the West: An Anthropology of Mental Illness in Europe and America. London: Continuum, 2002. Low, D.A. Lion Rampant: Essays in the Study of British Imperialism. London: Frank Cass, 1973. Maclean, K. ‘The Art of Panicking Quietly: British Expatriate Responses to “Terrorist Outrages” in India, 1912–33’. In H. Fischer-Tiné, ed., Anxieties, Fear and Panic in Colonial Settings: Empires on theVerge of a Nervous Breakdown. Houndmills: Palgrave, 2017. pp. 169–209. Mahmood,T. ‘Collaboration and British Military Recruitment: Fresh Perspectives from Colonial Punjab, 1914–1918’. Modern Asian Studies, vol. 50, no. 5 (September 2016): 1474–1500. Major, A.J. Return to Empire: Punjab under the Sikhs and British in the mid-­ Nineteenth Century. New Delhi: Sterling Publishers, 1996.   ‘State and Criminal Tribes in Colonial Punjab: Surveillance, Control and Reclamation of the “Dangerous Classes”’. Modern Asian Studies, vol. 33, no. 3 (1999): 657–88.   ‘The Punjabi Chieftains and the Transition from Sikh to British Rule’. In D.A. Low, ed., The Political Inheritance of Pakistan. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991. pp. 53–85.

Bibliography249 Mantena, K. Alibis of Empire: Henry Maine and the Ends of Liberal Imperialism. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2010. Marshall, P.J. Bengal:The British Bridgehead, Eastern India 1740–1828. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.   ‘Reappraisal: The Rise of British Power in Eighteenth-Century India’. South Asia, vol. 19, no. 1 (1996): 71–6.   The Making and Unmaking of Empires: Britain, India, and America c. 1750–1783. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Mazumder, R.K. The Indian Army and the Making of Punjab. New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003.   ‘From Loyalty to Dissent: Punjabis from the Great War to World War II’. In K. Roy, The Indian Army in the Two World Wars. Boston, MA: Brill, 2012. pp. 461–91. Mbembe, A. ‘Necropolitics’. Public Culture, vol. 15, no. 1 (2003): 11–40. McLeod, W.H. Exploring Sikhism: Aspects of Sikh Identity, Culture, and Thought. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000.   ‘Sikhs and Caste’. In T. Ballantyne, ed., Textures of the Sikh Past. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007. pp. 104–31.   Sikhs of the Khalsa: A History of the Khalsa Rahit. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Mehta, U.S. Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Metcalf, T.R. Ideologies of the Raj. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.   Imperial Connections: India and the Indian Ocean Arena, 1860–1920. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007.   The Aftermath of the Revolt: India, 1857–1870. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965. Moreman, T.R. ‘The Army in India, and the Military Periodical Press, 1830–98’. In D. Finklestein and D. Peers, eds., Negotiating India in the NineteenthCentury Media. London: Macmillan, 2000. pp. 210–32. Morgan, G. ‘Myth and Reality in the Great Game’. Asian Affairs, vol. 4, no. 1 (1973): 55–65. Motadel, D., ed. Islam and the European Empires. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Mukherjee, R. Awadh in Revolt, 1857–1858: A Study in Popular Resistance. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984. Neocleous, M. Critique of Security. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008. Nichols, R. The Frontier Crimes Regulation: A History in Documents. Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2013. Oberoi, H. ‘Brotherhood of the Pure: The Poetics and Politics of Cultural Transgression’. Modern Asian Studies, vol. 26, no. 1 (1992): 157–97.   The Construction of Religious Boundaries: Culture, Identity and Diversity in the Sikh Tradition. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994. Omissi, D. The Sepoy and the Raj: The Indian Army, 1860–1940. Hampshire: Macmillan, 1994. Padamsee, A. Representations of Indian Muslims in British Colonial Discourse. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.

250 Bibliography Pandey, G. ‘The Bigoted Julaha’. Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 18, no. 2 (January 1983): 19–28. Panikkar, K.N. Against Lord and State: Religion and Peasant Uprisings in Malabar, 1836–1921. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989. Patterson, S. The Cult of Imperial Honor in British India. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Peabody, N. ‘Tod’s Rajast’han and the Boundaries of Imperial Rule in NineteenthCentury India’. Modern Asian Studies, vol. 30, no. 1 (1996): 185–220. Peckham, R., ed. Empires of Panic: Epidemics and Colonial Anxieties. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2015. Peers, D.M. ‘Colonial Knowledge and the Military in India, 1780–1860’. Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, vol. 33, no. 2 (May 2005): 157–80.   ‘Conquest Narratives: Romanticism, Orientalism and Intertextuality in the Indian Writings of Sir Walter Scott and Robert Orme’. In M.J. Franklin, ed., Romantic Representations of British India. London: Routledge, 2006. pp. 238–58.   Between Mars and Mammon: Colonial Armies and the Garrison State in India, 1819–1835. London: Tauris, 1995.   ‘Soldiers, Scholars and the Scottish Enlightenment’. The International History Review, vol. 16, no. 3 (August 1994): 441–65.   ‘State, Power, and Colonialism’. In D. Peers and N. Gooptu, eds., India and the British Empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. pp. 16–43. Pettigrew, J. Robber Noblemen: A Study of the Political System of the Sikh Jats. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975. Plamper, J. The History of Emotions: An Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Popplewell, R. Intelligence and Imperial Defence: British Intelligence and the Defence of the Indian Empire, 1904–1924. London: Frank Cass, 1995. Puri, H.K. Ghadar Movement: Ideology, Organisation and Strategy. Amritsar: Guru Nanak Dev University Press, 1983. Rahman, T. Language, Ideology and Power: Language Learning among the Muslims of Pakistan and North India. Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2002.   Language Politics in Pakistan. Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1996. Ramnath, M. Haj to Utopia: How the Ghadar Movement Charted Global Radicalism and Attempted to Overthrow the British Empire. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press 2011. Rand, G. and Wagner, K.A. ‘Recruiting the “Martial Races”: Identities and Military Service in Colonial India’. Patterns of Prejudice, vol. 46, nos. 3–4 (2012): 232–54. Reinkowski, M. and Thum, G., eds. Helpless Imperialists: Imperial Failure, Fear, and Radicalization. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013. Robb, P. The Government of India and Reform: Policies Towards Politics and the Constitution 1916–1921. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976.   ‘The Ordering of Rural India: The Policing of Nineteenth-Century Bengal and Bihar’. In D. Anderson and D. Killingray, eds., Policing the Empire: Government, Authority and Control, 1830–1940. Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1991. pp. 126–50.

Bibliography251 Roque, R. ‘The Razor’s Edge: Portuguese Imperial Vulnerability in Colonial Moxico, Angola’. The International Journal of African Historical Studies, vol.  36, no. 1 Special Issue: Colonial Encounters Between Africa and Portugal (2003): 105–24. Roque, R. and Wagner, K.A., eds. Engaging Colonial Knowledge: Reading European Archives in World History. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Roseberry, J.R. Imperial Rule in the Punjab: The Conquest and Administration of Multan, 1818–1881. New Delhi: Manohar, 1987. Roy, M.P. Origin, Growth and Suppression of the Pindaris. New Delhi: Sterling Publishers, 1973. Saada, E. ‘The Empire of Law: Dignity, Prestige, and the Colonial Situation’, French Politics, Culture, and Society, vol. 20, no. 1, Special Issue: Regards Croisés: Transatlantic Perspectives on the Colonial Situation (2002): 98–120. Savage, J. ‘“Black Magic” and White Terror: Slave Poisoning and Colonial Society in Early 19th Century Martinique’, Journal of Social History, vol. 40, no. 3 (Spring 2007): 635–62. Sayer, D. ‘British Reactions to the Amritsar Massacre 1919–1920’. Past & Present, vol. 131, no. 1 (May 1991): 130–64. Schaller, D.J. ‘From Conquest to Genocide: Colonial Rule in German Southwest Africa and German East Africa’. In A.D. Moses, ed., Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History. New York & Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2008. pp. 296–324. Sen, S. Distant Sovereignty: National Imperialism and the Origins of British India. London: Routledge, 2002. Sharpe, J. Allegories of Empire:The Figure ofWomen in the Colonial Text. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Sherman, T.C. State Violence and Punishment in India. London & New York: Routledge, 2010. Siddiqi, Y. Anxieties of Empire and the Fiction of Intrigue. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008. Silvestri, M. ‘“The Sinn Féin of India”: Irish Nationalism and the Policing of Revolutionary Terrorism in Bengal’. Journal of British Studies, vol. 39, no. 4 (October 2000): 454–86. Singh, B.S., ed. The Letters of the FirstViscount Hardinge of Lahore to Lady Hardinge and Sir Walter and Lady James, 1844–1847. London: Royal Historical Society, 1986. Singh, G.S. ‘“Finding Those Men with Guts”: The Ascription and Re-Ascription of Martial Identities in India after the Uprising’. In C. Bates and G. Rand, eds., Mutiny at the Margins: New Perspectives on the Indian Uprising of 1857, Vol. 4: Military Aspects of the Indian Uprising. London and New Delhi: Sage, 2013. pp. 113–34. Singh, K.. A History of the Sikhs. 1966. 2 vols. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1991. Singha, R. A Despotism of Law: Crime and Justice in Early Colonial India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998.   ‘Punished by Surveillance: Policing “Dangerousness” in Colonial India, 1872–1918’. Modern Asian Studies, vol. 49, no. 2 (March 2015): 241–69.

252 Bibliography Sinha, M. Colonial Masculinity:The ‘Manly Englishman’ and the ‘Effeminate Bengali’ in the Late Nineteenth Century. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995. Sohi, S. Echoes of Mutiny: Race, Surveillance and Indian Anticolonialism in North America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Stokes, E. The English Utilitarians and India. 1959. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1982.   The Peasant and the Raj: Studies in Agrarian Society and Peasant Rebellion in Colonial India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978.   The Peasant Armed:The Indian Revolt of 1857. C.A. Bayly, ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986. Stoler, A.L. Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009.   ‘“In Cold Blood”: Hierarchies of Credibility and the Politics of Colonial Narratives’. Representations, vol. 37, Special Issue: Imperial Fantasies and Postcolonial Histories (Winter 1992): 151–89.   ‘On Degrees of Imperial Sovereignty’. Public Culture, vol. 18, no. 1 (2006): 125–46. Strachan, H. The Politics of the British Army. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. Streets, H. Martial Races: The Military, Race, and Masculinity in British Imperial Culture, 1857–1914. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004. Talbot, I. ‘British Rule in the Punjab, 1849–1947: Characteristics and Consequences’. Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, vol. 19, no. 2 (1991): 203–21.   The Punjab and the Raj 1849–1947. New Delhi: Manohar, 1988. Tan, T.Y. The Garrison State: The Military, Government and Society in Colonial Punjab, 1849–1947. New Delhi: Sage, 2005. Tatla, D.S. The Sikh Diaspora: The Search for Statehood. London: UCL Press, 1999. Taussig, M. Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Tickell, A. Terrorism, Insurgency and Indian-English Literature, 1830–1947. New York & London: Routledge, 2012. Travers, R. Ideology and Empire in Eighteenth-Century India: The British in Bengal. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Vann, M. ‘Fear and Loathing French Hanoi: Colonial White Images and Imaginings of “Native” Violence’. In M. Thomas, ed., The French Colonial Mind: Violence, Military Encounters, and Colonialism. 2 vols. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2011. vol. 2, pp. 52–76. Vartavarian, M. ‘Pacification and Patronage in the Maratha Deccan, 1803–1818’. Modern Asian Studies, vol. 50, no. 6 (November 2016): 1749–91. Wagner, K.A. ‘“Calculated to Strike Terror”: The Amritsar Massacre and the Spectacle of Colonial Violence’. Past & Present, vol. 233, no. 1 (November 2016): 185–225.   ‘The Marginal Mutiny: The New Historiography of the Indian Uprising of 1857’. History Compass, vol. 9, no. 10 (October 2011): 760–66.   Thuggee: Banditry and the British in Early Nineteenth-Century India. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

Bibliography253   The Great Fear of 1857: Rumours, Conspiracies and the Making of the Indian Uprising. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2010.   ‘“Treading Upon Fires”: The “Mutiny”-Motif and Colonial Anxieties in British India’. Past & Present, vol. 218, no. 1 (February 2013): 159–97. Washbrook, D.A. ‘India, 1818–1860: The Two Faces of Colonialism’. In A. Porter, ed., The Oxford History of the British Empire. 5 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. vol. 3, pp. 395–421.   ‘South India 1770 1840: The Colonial Transition’. Modern Asian Studies, vol. 38, no. 3 (July 2004): 479–516. Wilson, J.E. India Conquered: Britain’s Raj and the Chaos of Empire. London: Simon & Schuster, 2016.   The Domination of Strangers: Modern Governance in Eastern India, 1780–1835. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Yapp, M.E. Strategies of British India: Britain, Iran and Afghanistan 1798–1850. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980.   ‘The Legend of the Great Game’. Proceedings of the British Academy, no. 111 (2001): 179–98. Yang, A.A. ‘A Conversation of Rumors: The Language of Popular “Mentalités” in Late Nineteenth-Century Colonial India’. Journal of Social History, vol. 20, no. 3 (Spring 1987): 485–505.  ed. Crime and Criminality in British India. Tuscon, AZ: The University of Arizona Press, 1985.   The Limited Raj: Agrarian Relations in Colonial India, Saran District, 1793–1920. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990.

Internet Sources Ali, Z. ‘FATA: In a Black Box’. Dawn, 9 August 2015. Accessed 15 March 2016: www.dawn.com/news/1198967. ‘An Act to Amend the Law Relating to Terrorist Act, and for Other Purposes’. No. 127 2005. Australian Government. Accessed 3 August 2016: www .legislation.gov.au/Details/C2005A00127. ‘An Act to Enact the Security of Canada Information Sharing Act and the Secure Air Travel Act, to Amend the Criminal Code, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service Act and the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act and to make Related and Consequential Amendments to other Acts’. Parliament of Canada. Accessed 3 August 2016: www.parl.gc.ca/HousePublications/ Publication.aspx?DocId=8056977&File=4. ‘Great War Centenary Commemoration Project’. United Services Institution of India and the Indian Ministry of External Affairs. Accessed 24 November 2015: http://indiaww1.in. Husain, K. ‘Burying the Assassin’. Dawn, 3 March 2016. Accessed 7 April 2016: www.dawn.com/news/1243156. Jamal, U. ‘The Sectarian Dilemma in Pakistan’. Foreign Policy, 8 September 2015. Accessed 5 April 2016: http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/09/08/thesectarian-dilemma-in-pakistan/.

254 Bibliography Sarkar, A. ‘On Framing JNU for an Imaginary Crime’. Kafila.org, 16 February 2016. Accessed 17 February 2016: https://kafila.org/2016/02/16/on-framingjnu-for-an-imaginary-crime-aditya-sarkar/. ‘The Punjab Murderous Outrages Act, 1867’. The Commonwealth Legal Information Institute. Accessed 15 March 2016: www.commonlii.org/pk/ legis/pj/consol_act/pmoa1867302/. ‘Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism (USA PATRIOT ACT) Act of 2001’. U.S Government and Printing Office. Accessed 4 December 2014: www.gpo .gov/fdsys/pkg/BILLS-107hr3162enr/pdf/BILLS-107hr3162enr.pdf. Zakaria, R. ‘The Aesthetics of Terror’. Dawn, 30 March 2016. Accessed 4 April 2016: www.dawn.com/news/1248760/the-aesthetics-of-terror.   ‘The Terror of Fighting Terror’. Dawn, 29 July 2015. Accessed 26 August 2015: www.dawn.com/news/1196988/the-terror-of-fighting-terror.

Index

Abbott, James, 38, 65 Afghanistan, 231 as foreign threat, 49 fears of Russian invasion via, 19, 22, 31 First Anglo-Afghan War, 31–32 Amritsar, 2, 5, 6, 96, 101, 127, 135, 186, 201 district of, 88–90, 92, 93 Amritsar Massacre. See Jallianwala Bagh Massacre Anderson, William. See Multan, assassination of British officers Anglo-Maratha wars, 28–29 Anglo-Sikh wars, 25, 32, 33, 34, 39, 44, 65, 76 Auckland, Lord George Eden First Anglo-Afghan War, 31 political instability of Sikh kingdom following Ranjit Singh’s death, 33 Awadh, 11, 48, 66, 87, 131, 135 Ballantyne, Tony, 184 Baluchistan extension of the Murderous Outrages Act to, 142 incineration of ‘fanatics’, 160, 168 Bari Doab Canal, 84–85 Bayly, C.A., 12–13 Becher, James Reid, 151–52, 154, 158, 165, 227 Bengal, 12, 50, 55, 86, 97, 172, 188, 212 Bengal Army, 67, 88 conquest of by the Company. See East India Company counter-revolutionary efforts, 174–77 revolutionary violence in, 22, 198–99, 201, 211, 212, 223, 226 Santhal Rebellion, 16, 49, 66, 229 Bentinck, Lord William, 30 Burnes, Sir Alexander views on Sikhs, 75, 81 Calcutta, 26, 45, 124, 129, 204 canal colonies, 70, 95, 211, 212

Chandavarkar, Rajnarayan, 8 Chenab colony, 95 China, 95, 189, 194, 195–96, 196, 202 Churchill, Sir Winston, 4, 140, 150 Collingham, Elizabeth, 14 colonial knowledge and colonial power, 13 and military despotism. See military despotism, theory of as source of colonial anxiety, 13, 61–63 Comaroff, John and Jean, 156 conspiracies, 12, 21, 23, 34, 39, 56, 59–61, 206, 208, 210, 211, 220, 226, 229, 233 Cowan, John Lambert, 221, 227 attempts to be re-instated, 134, 135 concerns about a second Namdhari uprising, 135 reaction to his handling of the ‘Kooka outbreak’, 128–38, 149 role in the 1872 ‘Kooka outbreak’, 21, 103–5, 126–28 Crewe, Lord Robert Offley, 205, 212 Criminal Tribes Act (1871), 60, 139, 148, 157 Currie, Sir Frederick, 35, 36–38, 43 Curzon, Lord George Nathaniel, 42, 161, 162, 197, 198 Cust, Robert Needham, 89, 111, 217–19 Dalhousie, Lord James Andrew, 36, 44, 49 and the Second Anglo-Sikh War, 39 establishment of the Punjab Government, 106–8, 111–13 expresses shock over assassination of British officers at Multan, 64–65 portrait of, 38 Sikh pacification, 67, 76, 77–78, 80 military recruitment, 92 support for the Bari Doab Canal project, 84–85 warning that India always in a state of danger, 66

255

256 Index Davies, Sir Robert Henry response to ‘Kooka outbreak’, 128–30, 136 revenue assessment, 88 Defence of India Act (1915), 22, 174, 180, 182, 200, 201, 210–13, 222–24, 227, 228 Dhingra, Madan Lal, 199 Dow, Alexander, 45 Durand, Sir Henry Marion, 166, 167, 177–78 photograph of, 155 proponent of burning ‘fanatics’, 158 Durranis, 28, 46, 72 Dutch Sumatra, 15 employment of Indian soldiers and police in, 193–95 Dyer, Reginald E. See Jallianwala Bagh Massacre East India Company alienation from their Indian subjects, 12 and military mutinies, 55–56 and the Rebellion of 1857, 56–57. See also Rebellion of 1857 concerns about missionaries, 145 conquest of Bengal, 26 critiques of by Charles Napier. See Napier, Sir Charles early encounters with Sikhism, 72–74 fears of internal rebellion, 29–30, 220 formative impact of wars with Mughal successor states, 19, 20, 25 insecurity of, 27–28, 64, 106, 223 land revenue, 86 reliance on sepoys, 55, 181. See also sepoys wars of expansion. See Anglo-Sikh wars, Anglo-Maratha wars, First AngloAfghan War Edwardes, Sir Herbert and the siege of Multan, 38, 39 assassination attempts against, 150 Ellenborough, Lord (Edward Law), 31. See also Afghanistan Elphinstone, Lord Mountstuart, 48 Emmett, Florence, 140–41, 173 Eyre, Edward John, 103, 132, 152. See also Morant Bay Uprising (1865) ‘fanaticism’ and political violence, 170 motivations behind, 169 vagueness of definition, 165–68, 172, 174 First Anglo-Afghan War. See Afghanistan

First World War, 5, 19, 22, 94, 182, 199, 203, 214, 223, 228 Fitzpatrick, Sir Dennis, 161, 223 Forster, E.M., 217–18 Förster, Stig, 42 Forsyth, T.D., 21, 104, 127–29, 130–35, 137–38 French Empire, 16, 26, 30, 193, 194, 196, 220, 229 Frontier Crimes Regulation, 179, 205 Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand, 4, 225, 228 Germans, 202 fears of Indian recruitment by, 193, 194–96 German Empire, 15 Ghadar Party, 19, 22, 180, 182, 201–2, 212, 214, 222, 223, 228 activities in India, 203–7 attempts to subvert loyalty of Punjabi soldiers, 204–8 Punjab Government’s response to, 204–8 ghazis, 141, 160, 161, 222 definition of, 166 Gilroy, Paul, 15 Gough, Lord Hugh, 40 Government of India Acts (1919, 1935), 101, 178, 228 Grant Duff, Sir Mountstuart Elphinstone, 138 Guha, Ranajit, 11–12, 49 Gurkhas as a martial race, 80 Hardinge, Lord Charles, 199, 205–6, 208, 212 Hardinge, Lord Henry, 32, 34 Hindus, Hinduism, 46, 48, 56, 62, 96, 100, 102, 127, 136, 145, 147, 166, 171 as biologically distinct from Sikhs, 74–75 Hong Kong, 184, 189, 196, 197, 202, 203, 207 Hunter Committee, 6, 7, 222 Hunter, Sir William Wilson, 16 Hussain, Nasser, 4, 105, 108 Ibbetson, Sir Denzil, 96–98 incineration of ‘fanatics’, 157–63 Indian Army, 2, 19, 87, 181, 187, 190, 191, 192, 193 concerns about manpower shortages, 182, 185, 190, 194, 214 Ghadar attempts to subvert loyalty of, 97, 203, 204, 213

Index257 Punjabisation of, 19, 22, 67, 76, 224 Sikh representation in, 20, 70, 92 Indian ‘Mutiny’. See Rebellion of 1857 Indian nationalist movement, 22, 61, 96, 100, 215, 233 critiques of British rule, 24 critiques of ‘repressive’ legislation, 63, 173, 210 Indian National Congress, 7–8 loyalty of Punjab to British, 69, 101 response to the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre. See Jallianwala Bagh Massacre revolutionary violence, 144, 169, 174, 226 comparisons to frontier ‘fanatics’, 179 global dimensions of, 198–99 Indian Penal Code, 115, 118, 151, 152, 179, 188, 233 Jallianwala Bagh Massacre, 2–6, 17, 100, 104, 201, 220, 226 Jinnah, Muhammad Ali, 173 Kaur, Maharani Jind, 33, 38 Kaye, John William, 56, 60 Khilafat movement, 214 Kipling, Rudyard, 61–63, 113–15, 181, 217–18 Kitchener, Lord Horatio Herbert, 98 Kolsky, Elizabeth, 115, 144, 153 Kookas, Kukas. See Namdharis Kostal, R.W., 16 Lahore, 6, 8, 38, 79, 84, 96, 98, 100, 113, 114, 126, 133, 207 arrest of Ghadar conspirators, 206, 208 British Residency in, 34–35, 83 district of, 89–90 First Lahore Conspiracy Case, 210 Lawrence, Lord John Laird Mair, 106, 110, 223 and the rebellion at Multan, 36–38 as archetypal Punjab School administrator, 113–15, 121, 217 insistence on widespread applicability of Murderous Outrages Act, 166–67 on the need for the Murderous Outrages Act, 153 political importance of the Majha, 79–80 low revenue assessments, 87 need for irrigation, 82 portrait of, 155 proponent of incinerating ‘fanatics’, 159 Lawrence, Sir Henry Montgomery, 53, 54, 83, 103

as president of the Punjab Board of Administration, 110 views on civil-military conflicts in new Punjab Government, 106 views on Jat Sikhs, 81 legal codification, 19, 104, 115–16 and reform of the Punjab system, 122–24 and the ‘Kooka outbreak’, 135 and the Murderous Outrages Act, 142–44, 152 not incompatible with strong executive authority, 156–57, 222 resistance to by the Punjab School, 105, 113–18, 121–22 views of J.F. Stephen, 118–21, 138–39 Littlewood, Roland, 160 Lyall, Sir Alfred Comyn, 11, 89 MacMunn, Sir George Fletcher and martial races, 71 portrayal of political unrest in India, 229 Madras, 26, 146, 172, 199, 221 and John Malcolm, 28, 51 Maine, Sir Henry creation of the Murderous Outrages Act, 152, 154–57 critiques of Punjab School, 116, 117–19, 122 his definition of ‘fanaticism’, 167 Majha, Manjha Bari Doab Canal, 84, 85 British fears of unrest, 36–38, 79–80 generous revenue demand, 86, 89–91 loyalty during Rebellion of 1857, 70, 88 military recruitment, 91–94 need for irrigation, 82–84 political and military importance, 80, 94 Malcolm, Sir John, 51–53, 29, 30 and military despotism, 49, 51–53, 54 influence of, 30, 40, 53–54 passim, 223 views on Sikhs, 75 Malerkotla execution of Namdharis at, 129, 132, 136–37 Namdhari attack upon, 103, 126–27 Mantena, Karuna, 116 Mappilas, 144, 147, 148, 149, 158, 160, 163, 225, 226 as ‘fanatical’, 146–48, 157, 160 Marathas, 20, 26, 28–29, 49, 245, 246, 252 martial law, 64, 136, 209 as system of government for Punjab, 107–9, 112 during 1919 Punjab disturbances, 7, 101

258 Index martial races, 68, 70, 71, 91, 100, 198, 213–14 as a threat to imperial security, 212–13 popularity outside of India, 182–84 Sikh ‘craze’, 184–85 Mayne, John D., 221, 222 Mayo, Lord Richard assassination of, 124–26 his criticism of handling of ‘Kooka outbreak’, 129 legal and political reforms under, 122, 123 Mazumder, Rajit K., 87 McLeod, Sir Donald Friell, 133–34, 153, 158, 166 Meerut and Rebellion of 1857, 56–57, 87 Metcalf, Thomas, 14, 185 Metcalfe, Charles, 30, 109 military despotism, theory of, 40–54 Mill, James, 50 Minto, Lord Gilbert John, 94–95 handling of 1907 Punjab disturbances, 98–99 Moplah. See Mappilas Moplah Act, 1854, 148–49 influence of, 158 Morant Bay Uprising (1865), 16, 103, 132, 152 Mughal Empire and the Rebellion of 1857, 57 challenge from Marathas, 28 oriental despotism, 50 persecution of Sikhs, 74, 75 successor states to, 19, 20, 26, 72 British conflicts with, 25, 27, 28, 40, 106, 220 Mulraj, Dewan role in outbreak of Second Anglo-Sikh War, 34–38, 39 Multan, 38–39, 65, 84 assassination of British officers, 34–36, 64 murderous outrages. See ‘fanatical outrages’ and ghazism Murderous Outrages Act (1867), 141–45, 149, 154, 172, 177–80, 224, 227 and the rule of law, 152, 155–56 incineration of ‘fanatics’, 157–58 Indian critiques of, 165, 172–74, 178 Murderous Outrages Regulation (1901), 142, 162, 164, 179, 205 Muslims, 56, 62, 96, 166 communal tensions, 127, 186 distinctiveness from Sikhs, 74–75 as ‘fanatical’, 145–46, 149, 157–60, 171, 172, 222

princely states. See Malerkotla Punjabi Muslims, 20, 102, 136 as a martial race, 100, 184, 189, 191 representation in Sikh army, 80 Mysore, 20, 28 Namdharis and the 1872 ‘Kooka outbreak’, 103–4, 126–28, 132, 138, 157, 188 fears of a second rising, 136 foreign recruitment of, 185–88, 189 radicalism of, 126–27, 188 Napier, Charles, 57, 78, 83, 112 advocate of military rule, 106–8 criticism of political officers, 43, 44 Napier, Robert, 84 Nicholson, John, 150 non-regulation system, 120–21, 123. See also Punjab system North-West Frontier, 146, 178, 217, 226, 228 map of, 142 prevalence of ‘fanaticism’, 149, 179, 226 strategic importance of, 30, 67, 182 as a zone of legal exception, 21, 22, 118, 139 North-West Frontier Province, 142 and the Murderous Outrages Act, 164–65, 168, 170, 171, 176, 205 O’Dwyer, Sir Michael Francis and the creation of the Defence of India Act (1915), 22, 201, 204, 208 danger posed by Ghadar Movement, 211, 228 handling of 1919 Punjab disturbances, 6–7, 100–101, 222 Orwell, George, 59, 219 Pakistan, 69, 102, 179, 231–32 Pashtuns, 124, 142, 149, 169 Patel, Vithalbhai bill for the repeal of ‘repressive’ laws, 172–73, 178 Pearks, Stuart Edmond, 170–71 Peshawar, 140, 150, 151, 164, 168, 170, 173 Petrie, Sir David, 174–75, 223 Phadke, Vasudev Balwant, 224 pindaris. See Marathas political officers, 31, 41–42, 43–45, 50, 106 Pottinger, Henry, 146, 147, 148 prestige, 8, 10, 14, 16, 29, 32, 55, 59, 65, 113, 123, 128, 137, 142, 148, 156, 172, 218, 219

Index259 Prinsep, Edward Augustus, 90 Punjab disturbances of 1907, 94–100, 228 of 1919, 5–8, 100–101, 222, 224, 228 Punjab system, Punjab School, 19, 89, 104–5, 110–11, 112, 113, 130, 217 enduring influence of, 139, 223–24 reform of, 118–24, 131 Puri, Harish, 204, 212 Rai, Lala Lajpat, 8, 96, 98 Rajputs, 46–47, 49, 80 Rangachariar, Diwan Bahadur T., 173 Rebellion legal reforms in wake of, 115 Rebellion of 1857, 217, 223, 226 beginnings of, 56–57 comparisons with the ‘Kooka outbreak’, 103, 132 enduring trauma of, 20, 25, 57, 58, 59, 64, 95, 225 Ghadar, 203 execution of rebels by cannon, 14 expansion of colonial surveillance in wake of, 59–61 loyalty of Punjab during, 9, 20 ‘Mutiny’-motif, 104, 220 prompts Punjabisation of Indian Army, 67–68, 91 Punjab as the ‘saviour’ of India, 113–15 recruiting shift to martial races, 182 renewed authoritarianism in wake of, 105, 121, 122 validates Punjab policies, 88, 89, 94, 101, 102 Regulation III, 1818, 98, 136, 172 revenge, vengeance, 14, 65, 147, 149, 153, 156, 164, 165, 167, 169, 175 Rowlatt Act, 1919, 5, 8, 63, 201, 222 Russia, 19, 22, 32, 182, 194 Great Game, 31, 67 Santhal Rebellion. See Bengal Satyamurti, Sundara, 178–79 sepoys, 55, 56, 57, 68, 87, 93, 132, 151 execution of mutineers, 14, 55, 56, 103, 132 mutinies, 57 pay, 192 Sherman, Taylor C., 4 Sikhs, Sikhism, 20–21, 166, 181, 188, 189 Akali movement, 99–100 British perception of as both allies and enemies, 100–101, 102, 221 British wars with. See Anglo-Sikh Wars

concerns about deployment outside of India, 182, 185, 193–97, 214 decline in popularity for overseas service, 214 Jat Sikhs, importance of, 80–82, 86 Komagata Maru incident, 203, 204, 214 lack of support for Ghadar Movement, 212 loyalty during Rebellion of 1857, 69, 88 Mazhbi Sikhs, 80, 185 mobility of, 185 Namdhari Sikhs. See Namdharis and ‘Kooka outbreak’ of 1872 over-recruitment, 190–91 pacification of, 77–78, 94, 102, 213, 220, 227 disarmament and disbandment of Khalsa army, 78–79 expansion of irrigation, 82–86 generous revenue demand, 86–91 preferential military recruitment, 91–94 popularity for service outside of India, 183–84, 192 Sikh kingdom, 31, 32, 33–34, 49 suspected Ghadarites, 207 as targets of ‘fanatical’ assassins, 154 unrest over 1906 Colonization Bill, 94–100 as warlike, 67, 70–77, 211 Sindh, 43, 49, 86, 107, 108, 109 Singh, Ajit, 96, 97, 98 Singh, Bhagat, 170 Singh, Duleep, 33, 39 Singh, Khan, 35–36 Singh, Maharajah Ranjit, 32, 34, 72 political position of Jat Sikhs under, 81, 91–92 portrait of, 72 Singh, Ram, 127, 136, 186, 188 Singh, Sher, 38, 39 Sleeman, Sir William Henry, 47, 48, 81 sovereignty, 4, 17, 21, 117, 149, 156, 157, 222 according to J.F. Stephen, 124, 138 as a state of exception, 108, 145, 172 definition of, 18, 105 Stephen, Sir James Fitzjames, 116–17, 221, 224 on need to preserve strong executive authority, 123–24, 138–39, 156–57 opinions on the ‘Kooka outbreak’, 126, 131, 136–37 reform of Punjab system, 123 views on legal codification, 119–21 Stokes, Eric, 105, 110, 111

260 Index Straits Settlements, 183, 189, 191, 193, 194, 196 Strange, T.L., 147–48, 157 Taussig, Michael, 15, 163 Taylor, Philip Meadows, 47 Taylor, Reynell George assassination attempts against, 150 defence of Cowan’s handling of ‘Kooka outbreak’, 132 Temple, Richard, 58, 92, 130, 223, 225 terror, terror tactics, 8, 15–16, 55, 144, 147, 158, 162–63, 177, 229

terrorism, terrorists, 5, 170–71, 174, 175– 77, 179, 199, 211, 226, 232, 233–34 thuggee, 47, 59, 80, 226 Thuggee Act (1836), 148 Tod, James, 46–47 Vann, Michael, 16 Vans Agnew, Patrick. See Multan, assassination of British officers Vellore Mutiny, 56 Wagner, Kim A., 4, 55, 63, 68, 104, 163, 225 Wilks, Mark, 45–46