The popular image of an East India Company army officer is of a gentleman, the younger son of a small country squire or vicar who could not afford to set him up at home. Often as not he had Scots or Irish blood and was ‘well-educated, hardy and ambitious’. He tended to be a man of firm religious convictions, and went out to India not only to make his fame and fortune but because he believed it to be his Christian duty.
There were men like this: John Nicholson, of well-born Ulster Protestant stock, who made his name as a political officer on the North-West Frontier before becoming, at thirty-four, the youngest brigadier-general in the Bengal Army; William Hodson, the Cambridge-educated younger son of the Archdeacon of Stafford, who developed into a first-rate intelligence officer and commanded the finest irregular cavalry in India; and ‘Joe’ Lumsden, the scion of a Scottish artillery officer, who pacified the unruly Hazara region with Sikh troops at the age of twenty-five, shortly before founding the Corps of Guides. But these men were exceptional. By the mid nineteenth century the typical Indian Army officer was of modest social origins, illeducated and only interested in India as a means of bettering himself. ‘People do not come here to live, to enjoy life,’ commented one French traveller in 1830. ‘They come – and this is true of all classes of society – in order to earn the wherewithal to enjoy themselves elsewhere.’
It is a common misconception that the East India Company’s white officers were drawn from the same social élite – the aristocracy, gentry and rich upper middle classes – that dominated the British Army’s officer corps. In truth they came ‘from the “pseudo gentry”, from the genteel poor and from the sons of East India Company servants who were effectively barred, by their lack of connexions and lack of cash, from access to the traditional areas of gentlemanly employment – government service, the established church, medicine, the armed forces of the Crown and the English bar’. These impecunious middle-class parents could not have afforded the high purchase price of a commission in the British Army; cadetships in the East India Company’s army, on the other hand, were in the gift of the Court of Directors, who were only too happy to assist their less prosperous colleagues.
Given that most cadets were relatively poor, it follows that their chief motive for entering the Company’s service was because it was well paid and ‘offered an accessible avenue to social status and financial security’. A newly commissioned Company ensign, for example, received a minimum of 182 rupees (£18) a month; this was more than double the amount paid to his British Army counterpart, who was expected to supplement it with a private income. Extra-regimental appointments were even better paid: an officer serving as an adjutant in a Bengal Irregular Cavalry regiment, for instance, was given an allowance of 170 rupees on top of his normal pay. As a result, most officers could hardly wait to abandon regular regimental duty for these lucrative detached posts. ‘Financial considerations produced a distaste for the ordinary round of sepoy management and training,’ wrote one commentator, ‘and conspired to create a positive dislike of the sepoy and of all things Indian, a development pregnant with danger.’
It did not help that the standard of training and education that Company officers received before joining their regiments was generally poor. In 1809 a military seminary was established at Addiscombe, near Croydon; but even Addiscombe officers were inadequately taught. The curriculum was dominated by mathematics. Of the other subjects, civil and military drawing were ‘trifles of more use in the salon than on the battlefield’, fortification based on Marshal Vauban, the celebrated seventeenth-century engineer, ‘was largely obsolete and irrelevant to Indian conditions’, chemistry and classics were too narrow in their focus, and the study of Hindustani was ‘perfunctory’. Addiscombe produced many high achievers; but they seem to have succeeded in spite of, rather than because of, the seminary. ‘My education consisted in kicks,’ recalled Sir Henry Lawrence. ‘I was never taught anything – no, not even at Addiscombe.’
Direct-entry cadets, who accounted for two thirds of all new officers, were more poorly educated still. Until 1851 – when the Company introduced exams for non-Addiscombe cadets – there was no academic bar to becoming an officer. The vast majority of these cadets were educated at cheap proprietory schools, well known for their ‘slavish devotion to the classics and frequent recourse to the birch’. They had, as a result, received only ‘a bare minimum of education’ by the time they reached India.
Company officers were characterized by inadequate learning and an unseemly desire to abandon their regiments for better-paid detached appointments. This was a particular problem in the Bengal Presidency because the large expansion of its territory in the first half of the nineteenth century meant an increasing demand for civil administrators, political officers, staff officers, surveyors, engineers and commandants of local and irregular corps. In 1835 the total number of East India Company officers on detached employ was five hundred and thirty-two; by 1852 the figure had almost doubled with the Bengal Army supplying an average of six officers per regiment, the Bombay Army five, and the Madras Army three and a half. At the outset of the mutiny the total figure had climbed to 1,237 with the Bengal Army still the worst affected. If officers on sick leave and furlough are also taken into account, most Bengal infantry regiments had fewer than half their twenty-four officers present in May 1857. Even more alarming was the fact that the majority of absentees were field officers (majors and above) and captains. ‘Deduct commanding officer, adjutant and quartermaster, and all ensigns under two years’ service,’ noted Lieutenant-General Sir Patrick Grant, the temporary Commander-in-Chief of India, ‘and there remains 5¾ officers per regiment for company duty.’ In a regiment of ten companies, this meant just over one qualified officer for every two companies.
Such high levels of absenteeism were bound to have a detrimental effect on regimental morale and discipline, particularly in the Bengal Army. Referring to the period before the mutiny, Sitaram Pandy recalled that ‘any clever officer was always taken away from his regiment for some appointment’ and that when he returned many years later ‘he knew very little about the men’. One of the reasons that Sir Charles Napier gave for first tendering his resignation in April 1850 was because officers were withdrawn for detached duty ‘by the civil authorities, without any distinct recommendation through the military authorities’. Officers, as a result, ‘looked at their regiments merely as stepping stones to lucrative civil appointments’ that were not dependent upon ‘professional character’. He added: ‘Thus the mainspring of the Army was relaxed. The officers saw that the posts of emolument were not granted for military duties, and military duty became a painful task.’
Napier’s fears were confirmed by Montagu Hall who, in 1852, did duty as an ensign with a ‘distinguished’ Bengal Native Infantry regiment. ‘I was awfully disappointed with what I saw of native Regiments,’ recalled Hall, ‘the whole thing seemed to be a sham and a delusion… The senior officers were all either absent on Staff employ, leave, or married. We went most mornings to be drilled under the European Sergeant-Major, but parades of the regiment, there seemed none. The Adjutant did all the work and the chief idea of the officers seemed how to get away from regimental duty.’ Major John Jacob was even more dismissive. ‘The “REFUSE” only remain,’ he wrote in 1854. ‘All proper feeling is thus totally destroyed between the native soldier and his European superior.’ This was not because there were too few officers, but rather because too many of those left were mediocre and uninterested in their duty or their men. Jacob believed that ‘one active, energetic, right-feeling, and right-thinking English gentleman can, even when alone, infuse an excellent spirit into thousands of these Eastern soldiers’. His solution, therefore, was to appoint only three European officers, ‘carefully selected and entrusted with full powers’, to each regiment.
But nothing had changed by the outbreak of the mutiny. In a memorandum to Lord Canning of 29 June 1857 General Sir Patrick Grant identified a ‘want of officers in whom the sepoy could confide’ as one of the key factors that had given rise to a feeling of ‘dissatisfaction and distrust’ among the Bengal troops long before their religious fears were played upon by conspirators. This, in turn, was caused by the fact that so few officers were present with their regiments. ‘Further, these officers are discontented,’ wrote Grant, ‘only looking forward to leaving their regiments for some more pleasant employment, so that they perform, and unwillingly, the bare outline of their duty, and never, as a general rule, mix or converse with their men; but, on the contrary, too often refuse to listen to their complaints, at the best telling them to go to the adjutant, and not unfrequently, “Go to hell – don’t bother me!”’
Part of the problem was boredom. A regimental officer in a medium-sized station in upper India had very few duties and even fewer distractions, particularly during the hot season. Most were unmarried and lived in rows of detached brick bungalows in the European section of the military cantonment, itself a mile or two from the main civil settlement. Even the junior officers were looked after by a host of servants who generally lived with their families in whitewashed huts at the back of their employer’s large compound. They could number anything up to fifteen, including a bearer, cook, syce, sweeper, bhisti, laundryman, tailor, gardener, several punkah-wallahs and a khidmatgar, or butler, who, in the case of an officer stationed at Dum-Dum, ‘did credit to [his master’s] selection, arranging for ice, fresh fish and other luxuries to be brought in daily by a coolie from Calcutta’.
A typical day for a regimental officer began with an early ride before the short morning parade. He then bathed, read the papers and had breakfast, a substantial meal that included anything from eggs to beef chops, fried fish to curried fowl. The rest of the morning was taken up with reading and writing. From noon to two, calls were made on local society, both military and civil, followed by tiffin (light lunch) and a siesta. Some spent the afternoon reading or playing billiards. In the larger stations an officer would go for an early evening walk or ride in the company of the garrison’s ladies. He then had dinner, the main meal of the day, in his own bungalow, the regimental mess or as the guest of a European family. ‘Smoking, drinking, and singing are kept up till a very late hour,’ wrote one officer who regularly dined with his brother officers, ‘when the whole adjourn to a hot supper, composed of devilled bones, mulligatawny, and hot stews, beer and other drinks being matters of course.’
Apart from the occasional stint on guard duty and the odd parade, a regimental officer had very little to do. He therefore spent most of his time with his fellow officers. But an educated young subaltern like William Hodson found the limitations of garrison life extremely dull. From Subathu, in the foothills of the Himalayas, he wrote:
Ladies’ society there is none: there are a few who call themselves such, but with very little reason, save that they are not men. There is much in India to interest one, much worthy of all one’s efforts, many most important duties and influences, but nothing to call forth one’s affections or any of the softer and more delightful feelings of youth and life. In fact, one’s life is a harsh reality; nothing is left to the imagination; no amenities; no poetry; no music; nothing elegant; nothing refined. There is nothing left but to be up and doing…
Most regimental officers had neither Hodson’s culture nor his positive frame of mind. Ensign Allen Johnson of the 5th Bengal Native Infantry was typical. ‘My disgraceful laziness is appalling,’ reads his diary entry for 18 July 1850. ‘I have hardly opened a book or written a line for the last ten days. In fact have done absolutely nothing but lounge and saunter about, now taking up a book and gazing at it with lack luster [sic] eye or kicking about restlessly on my bed. My only fixed idea having been yearnings for home and a detestation of natives and native things.’
The relationship between officers and Indian soldiers had not always been so lacking in mutual respect. Recalling his early years in a sepoy regiment, Sitaram Pandy wrote: ‘The sahibs often used to give nautches [entertainment by erotic dancers] for the regiment, and they attended all the men’s games. They also took us with them when they went out hunting, or at least those of us who wanted to go. Nowadays they seldom attend nautches because the Padre sahibs have told them it is wrong.’ Sitaram also had fond memories of his company commander – nicknamed the ‘Wrestler’ because he used to join the men in the wrestling arena – entertaining a constant stream of men at his house. Some went to further their chances of promotion, but most ‘because we liked the sahib who always treated us as if we were his children’. It helped that many of the officers had Indian mistresses (bibis) and even wives, which naturally facilitated their grasp of Hindustani and the ease with which they could communicate with their men. But the practice began to die out in the 1820s and 1830s as more European wives and female relatives of civil and military officers came to live in India, and it became socially unacceptable to keep a bibi or marry a Eurasian. ‘The root of the problem,’ wrote the author of a book on British women in India, ‘was that women represented home.’ She added:
They were sent out as portable little packets of morality, to comfort their men, keep the blood-line clean, and remind them of their mothers. Those fitted to the part sought security in an extremely strange land in creating for themselves a hidebound home from home involving all the parochial strictures of English provincial life. Pianos and plush-draped dining tables and dismal prints of The Monarch of the Glen would be shipped over to furnish their parlours; there would be amateur theatricals, musical soirées, and elaborate great dinners to be endured… There was snobbery and scandal: life might almost have been bearable, in fact, were it not for the stupid heat and natives.
With Europeans increasingly keeping their own society, contact between officers and men was reduced to a minimum. ‘I have lived to see great changes in the sahibs’ attitude towards us,’ wrote Sitaram. ‘I know that many officers nowadays only speak to their men when obliged to do so, and they show that the business is irksome and try to get rid of the sepoys as quickly as possible. One sahib told us that he never knew what to say to us. The sahibs always knew what to say, and how to say it, when I was a young soldier.’ It is surely no coincidence that the only two traditionally recruited Bengal Native Infantry regiments to remain loyal and keep their weapons in 1857 were commanded by men with Indian family ties: Major Henry Milne of the 21st Native Infantry was married to the Eurasian granddaughter of Colonel James Skinner; Major William Hampton of the 31st Native Infantry had two daughters by an Indian mistress.
In 1844, in an attempt to improve relations between officers and men, the Indian government ordered that no subaltern could command a troop or company until he had passed a colloquial examination in the Hindustani language. For officers who had joined since 1837, the appointments of adjutant and interpreter were already dependent upon possession of the basic qualification in written and spoken Hindustani. Yet, according to one correspondent to the United Service Magazine, the number of Indian Army officers who were qualified as interpreters in two languages – Hindustani and Persian – was becoming ‘small by degrees and beautifully less’. The writer put this down to the fact that young officers had begun to realize that, as far as their career prospects were concerned, patronage was far more important than a knowledge of native languages: ‘the cadet comes out, studies hard, and then finds that without interest all his efforts and money have been thrown away. His brother cadets seeing this, are warned in time, and consequently resolve to pitch Hindustani books and moonshees [native language teachers] to the devil.’
Sir Charles Napier, during his time as Commander-in-Chief, dealt with a number of cases in which sepoys were court-martialled for insolence when they were simply trying to make their officer understand what they were saying. The root of the problem, according to Napier, was that officers were ‘now more numerous than formerly, and associate apart’. He added: ‘All old officers of name in the Company’s service… have complained that the younger race of Europeans keep aloof from Native officers; showing thereby want of foresight, and casting away, as of no value, the strong attachment these natives are so susceptible of forming for them. How different this from the spirit which actuated old men of Indian renown!’ Other commentators believed intimacy had been replaced by contempt. ‘The sepoy is esteemed an inferior creature,’ wrote a contemporary. ‘He is sworn at. He is treated roughly. He is spoken of as a “nigger”. He is addressed as a “suar” or pig, an epithet most opprobrious to a respectable native, especially a Mussalman… The old men are less guilty as they sober down. But the younger men seem to regard it as an excellent joke.’
Relations between Bengal officers and troops continued to deteriorate in the years leading up to the mutiny. In 1856 Sir Henry Lawrence recommended the abolition of Indian officers on the grounds that it would force European officers to look into the ‘interior economy’ of their regiments of companies. ‘Seldom is anything of the kind done at present,’ he wrote. ‘So long as all is smooth and quiet on the surface, few inquiries are made. All may be rotten below; the jog-trot is followed – a mine may be ready to be sprung, for all that nine-tenths of the officers would know.’
Two other factors that contributed to the worsening relations between officers and men were the generally poor quality of regimental commanding officers and the fact that many of them were unfamiliar to their men. Both were the result of the same system of promotion by seniority that applied to the sepoys. All officers became colonels if they served for long enough, regardless of ability. But promotion was so slow, particularly in the Bengal Army, that officers did not reach the upper ranks until a relatively late age. In 1857 the average age of Bengal divisional, brigade and regimental commanders was sixty-six, fifty-five and fifty years respectively. The exceptions in Bengal were commandants of irregular cavalry regiments: they were more sprightly than their regular counterparts – the average was a little under forty years old – because they had been appointed on the basis of selection rather than seniority.
As well as being old and inefficient, many colonels were virtual strangers to their men. This was because all officers, on reaching the rank of lieutenant-colonel, were removed from their regimental lists to a branch list for the whole army. Once on that general list, an officer would only be appointed to command his original regiment if the major were either absent or the most junior in the branch. Otherwise he would take command of the regiment with the most junior commander; which is why so many regiments were commanded by men who had spent the majority of their service elsewhere. Sitaram Pandy stressed the importance of continuity when he noted that new commanding officers were never welcome. ‘Among us there is a great dislike for new ways,’ he added. ‘One sahib upsets what the other has done, and we do not know what to do because what we have been taught one day is wrong the next.’
An even more important reason for the breakdown of officer–sepoy relations was the gradual weakening of the regimental commanding officer’s power to punish as more authority was concentrated at army headquarters in the decades prior to the mutiny. This move towards a more centralized military system was part of a wider process of government reform in India that was being driven by the political philosophy of Utilitarianism: a belief that human legislators were required to ‘assist men to avoid harmful acts by artificially weighting such acts with the pain of punishment’. Utilitarianism retained, therefore, an immense faith in the power of law and government to shape conduct and transform character. With regard to India, its chief proponents were men like James Mill, his son John Stuart Mill and Edward Strachey, all senior officials at the London headquarters of the East India Company in Leadenhall Street, and Lord William Bentinck, Governor-General of India from 1827 to 1835. At a farewell dinner in London, attended by a number of leading Utilitarians including Jeremy Bentham, Bentinck is said to have remarked to James Mill: ‘I am going to British India, but… it is you that will be Governor-General.’
The Utilitarian passion for uniformity, mechanistic administration and legislative regulation resulted in, among other things, an erosion of the commanding officer’s power to impose summary punishments. For most of the first three decades of the nineteenth century Bengal commanding officers were able to impose a wide range of punishments without recourse to a court martial – including dismissal, corporal punishment with a rattan cane, reduction of NCOs to the ranks, refusing furlough and awarding extra drill and duty. But these powers were gradually reduced by the introduction of official regulations. By 1845, when the first Articles of War were enacted for all three presidency armies, summary punishments were restricted to fifteen days’ extra drill, seven days’ confinement in the quarter-guard, removal from staff situations or acting appointments, piling shot and cleaning accoutrements. The effect this reduction of power could have on the discipline of a regiment is illustrated by Lieutenant-Colonel Drought who, after three years’ furlough, resumed command of the 60th Bengal Native Infantry in January 1857. He wrote:
I saw very great laxity in the ranks, worse even than when I got command of the regiment in 1849. The authority of the commanding officer had become less than mine was as a subaltern, as regards punishment drill to non-commissioned officers, owing to army standing orders being set aside by circulars, and by station orders issued by officers perfectly ignorant of the proper method of keeping sepoys in subjection, and thereby interfering with the commanding officer’s authority, and rendering him a mere cipher in the eyes of his men…
As well as the curtailment of their powers of summary punishment, Bengal colonels also experienced considerable interference with their authority to convene and confirm courts martial. At the same time the range of sentences these courts martial could impose was reduced. In 1835, for example, Lord William Bentinck abolished corporal punishment throughout the native army. Bentinck’s rationale was that flogging deterred ‘young men of respectable connections’ from joining up and produced ‘a baneful influence upon the pride, the manly feeling and the character of the whole service’. Its abolition was therefore a practical manifestation of the Utilitarian theory that human character could be transformed by enlightened legislation.
Most of the Indian military regarded the abolition as a mistake, particularly those British Army officers who occupied the senior commands. Their colleagues were in the process of seeing off a sustained campaign by Radical MPs to abolish flogging in the British Army, though the maximum number of lashes was limited to fifty in 1846. No supporter of corporal punishment was more strident than the Duke of Wellington. He believed, as did many in India, that army discipline depended upon a regimental commanding officer having the ultimate sanction of flogging to back up his power to impose summary punishments. Without it, he informed the adjutant-general, ‘We might as well pretend to extinguish the lights in our houses or theatres by extinguishers made of paper as to maintain the discipline of the army.’
After much lobbying, corporal punishment was reintroduced by the Governor-General, Lord Hardinge (himself a British Army officer), in 1845. But a separate resolution confined its application to serious military crimes like mutiny, insubordination and drunkenness on duty; it could not be used to punish ‘disgraceful’ offences such as stealing, embezzlement and the self-infliction of wounds. Moreover, officers were advised to ‘inflict corporal punishment as seldom as possible, commuting it for other punishment in all cases where it can be done with safety to the discipline of the army’. As a result of these restrictions, flogging was used sparingly in all three presidencies, particularly Bengal. So sparingly, in fact, that sepoys did not regard it as a deterrent. One Bengal colonel was frequently told by his native officers: ‘As long as [the lash] was hanging over that bad man’s head he was all right, but now they do not care for the commanding officer or anyone else.’
Having effectively lost the sanction of corporal punishment, Bengal commanding officers were further undermined by the frequency with which sepoys attempted to overturn the sentences of courts martial by petitioning the commander-in-chief. In theory, no Indian soldier could petition his commander-in-chief except through the medium of his commanding officer. Yet in the Bengal Army petitions were regularly sent from sepoys directly to the commander-in-chief without censure; and, to add insult to injury, these appeals were often upheld. According to Brigadier Coke, many Bengal commanding officers had had men who had been dismissed as unfit, or by sentence of court martial, returned to their regiments after they had presented petitions at headquarters. The general feeling engendered among sepoys by these and other similar acts (such as the lack of ‘discretion to promote, save by seniority’) was, said Coke, ‘that their commanding officer was helpless to punish or reward’. This gradual erosion of a commanding officer’s power was, in his opinion, ‘one of the principal causes of bringing about the mutiny’.
By 1857 the indiscipline of the Bengal Army was notorious. In February of that year, before the first news of the cartridge question had reached Britain, the United Service Gazette described the Bengal sepoy as a ‘lackadaisical, discontented idler, prompt to seize excuses for refusing to do his duty, and absolutely rendering the presence of Europeans necessary… to keep him to his allegiance’. On 31 May, with the mutiny in full swing, the Magistrate of Benares blamed the ‘fake and hollow’ system of military government. He added: ‘The system of centralization has proved to be the ruin of the native army. All power is centred in the highest authority. Regimental officers have no authority, they are mere puppets, and the sepoys cannot look up to such weak and powerless men with respect. In days of yore the commanding officer was the [lord] of every sepoy, he could punish neglect & reward [diligence]. He was therefore respected and beloved. Now he cannot promote a sepoy to be a naik without the sanction of proper authority.’
There was also a belief that the laxity of discipline in the Bengal Army had inflated the sepoys’ sense of importance, and that confrontation had been inevitable. ‘The [Bengal sepoys] are confident of their power to dictate terms to their masters,’ declared the English-language Friend of India on 7 May 1857. Giving evidence to the post-mutiny Peel Commission, one Bengal general remarked upon the ‘leniency with which various acts of misconduct, all more or less bordering on mutiny, were on several occasions dealt with’, in consequence of which the Bengal sepoys, ‘who under their own system would have been ruled with a rod of iron, lost the awe necessary to the preservation of discipline in a large army’.
The mutiny has been characterized as a sepoy backlash against the excessive brutality of white officers. The truth could not have been more different. Bengal sepoys had many professional grievances, not least their poor relations with their European officers who were both neglectful and often appallingly disrespectful towards them. But harsh discipline was not one of them. The officers lacked the power to be brutal and, if anything, were too lenient. Discipline suffered and the sepoys interpreted this as a sign of weakness. ‘The principal cause of the rebellion,’ recorded Sitaram Pandy, ‘was the feeling of power that the sepoys had, and the little control the sahibs were allowed to exert over them. Naturally, they assumed from this the Sirkar must be afraid of them, whereas it only trusted them too well.’