16
AFTER REPORTING TO LAHORE, where Henry Lawrence had established his headquarters at a disused Mughal tomb in the suburbs, Nigel backtracked out of Jullundur to Hoshiarpur district, seventy-five miles to the northeast. As he set to work sorting out the tax assessments in the fall of 1846, he was conscious of playing a supporting role in a larger drama. Henry Lawrence had charged his brother John with winning over natives who were skeptical about the latest in a long line of outsiders who came from somewhere far away and insisted they were there to help. Officially, the Trans-Sutlej districts were wanted as a “buffer zone,” an equilateral triangle of real estate some seventy-five miles to a side, its apex aimed like the point of an arrow toward the mountain passes leading into Kashmir. But Lawrence also saw the region as a potential showpiece of British good works for the benefit of an audience beyond its boundaries. No less than with the spectacle of the enormous guns borne by elephants to the mountain citadel of Kangra, he wanted word of the new government’s integrity to spread throughout the Punjab.
“The conditions of daily living will be as rustic as any I have known,” wrote Nigel in a letter to his parents. “But I relish the opportunity to bring timely relief to Natives who have long been afflicted with Robbers in the guise of Revenue Officers.”
As he expected, his accommodations at Hoshiarpur were on the rough side, in a house where the racket of rats inside the walls subsided only in the small hours of morning. But it was situated on a quiet lane lined with jacaranda trees, and he delighted in the prospect of the forested Siwalik Hills nearby. The local household fuel was aromatic pinewood, a welcome change from the dried cow patties burned elsewhere in India.
Above all, Hoshiarpur was “reliably safe,” despite its recent status as enemy territory. The closest hostilities during the war were a hundred miles away. Two or three thousand Company troops were stationed nearby at Jullundur, fulfilling Henry Lawrence’s vision of the Punjab’s future: a sovereign Sikh kingdom, “fenced in and fortified by British bayonets.” The Sikhs moreover were now allies, not enemies, having proven themselves under British officers on a military expedition sent by Lawrence to install a Hindu ruler in predominantly Muslim Kashmir. (A success at the time, it proved to be the worst decision Lawrence ever made, and led to religious conflict that persists today, with nuclear weapons replacing matchlocks in the arsenals of the aggrieved.)
So there was really nothing much for an Englishman to worry about in Hoshiarpur, apart from malaria and snakebite and the constancy of house servants in matters of hygiene. From some of the perennial banes of colonial existence there was no escaping, anywhere in India. But the difficulties that Nigel feared might impede his work there—anti-British feeling, principally, and resistance to change—had so far failed to show themselves when he wrote home after a few months in his new position. Most of the people were Hindus or Muslims who cared too little for the Sikh administration to regret its departure. Instead of resenting the Englishmen who had taken charge, many seemed to welcome them. Cultivators were surprised and delighted by the promise of lower taxes. Once the British proved themselves as good as their word, the initial battle for the hearts and minds of the populace would be won.
For the first time in years—perhaps for the first time ever—Nigel believed in what he was doing. He wrote with evident pride of his own part in “gaining the favour of the inhabitants through fulfilling their desire for fair treatment,” and lauded Lawrence for his wisdom:
“I am sure that he is the man to keep the peace, if the peace is to be kept.”
On the other side of the Punjab, however, were the wilder Trans-Indus districts where the lieutenants who came to be known as “Henry Lawrence’s Young Men” had a tougher challenge. There, between the Indus River and the mountains of Afghanistan, such officers as Harry Lumsden, John Nicholson, James Abbott, and Herbert Edwardes were obliged to reckon with warriors, not farmers. Their daunting brief was to apply Lawrence’s humanitarian principles to Muslim tribes who were accustomed to governing themselves by Pashtunwali, an unwritten social code dating back to pre-Islamic times.
Most of its precepts were directly tied to notions of honor. The law of tureh, or bravery, required Pashtuns to defend their property, families, and women against all incursions. The law of sabat, or loyalty, insisted upon unconditional loyalty to friends, family, and tribe members. By the law of nanawati the Pashtun was expected to shelter and protect anyone who sought asylum under his roof, even one of his enemies and even at the sacrifice of his own life and property. Less onerous hospitality—food and accommodation—could be demanded under the law of melmastia by any traveler who appeared at his house and demanded it, with no expectation of favor or remuneration.
Paramount above all was the law of badal, which could be translated with equal accuracy as either “justice” or “revenge.” The concepts, under Pashtunwali, were identical. Even a taunt was regarded as an insult that could be redressed only by bloodshed. Nor was there a statute of limitations. Badal applied to the wrongs of the past as well as of the present. If the original wrongdoer was dead—even a thousand years dead—his descendants might still be held to account for his misdeeds.
In consequence, the Trans-Indus country was a land of unending violence fueled by ancient vendettas. In 1849–50, the first year in which statistics were kept at Peshawar, murders or crimes accompanied by murder occurred at a rate of one per day. On public roads, as on private property, fear reigned supreme.
“The men, although wearing arms as regularly as others do clothes, seldom or never move beyond the limits of their own lands except disguised as beggars or priests,” noted Henry Bellew, a surgeon who served under Harry Lumsden. “Feuds are settled and truces patched up but they break out afresh at the smallest provocation.”
The situation faced by Herbert Edwardes, charged by Lawrence in March 1847 with “starting fair on an era of law and order” in Bannu, was typical. The country itself—an oval basin irrigated by two rivers and bounded on three sides by mountains—was the picture of an Eastern Arcadia, a “smiling vale,” fecund and lovely. In Bannu, wrote Edwardes in his memoir A Year on the Punjab Frontier, in 1848–49, crops never failed:
The rudest and idlest agriculture is overpaid with corn, sugar, turmeric, and almost all the Indian grains in abundance. In spring it is a vegetable emerald; and in winter its many-coloured harvests look as if Ceres had stumbled against the great Salt Range, and spilt half her cornucopia in this favoured vale. As if to make the landscape perfect, a graceful variety of the shee-shum tree, whose boughs droop like the willow, is found here, and here alone; while along streams, and round the villages, the thick mulberry, festooned with the wild vine, throws a fragrant shade, beneath which well-fed Sayuds [holy men] look exquisitely happy, sleeping midway through their beads. Roses, too, without which Englishmen have learnt from the East to think no scenery complete, abound in the upper parts, at the close of spring.
Alas, the promise of this land of plenty was betrayed by the malevolence of its inhabitants:
“Altogether, nature has so smiled on Bunnoo, that the stranger thinks it a paradise; and when he turns to the people, wonders how such spirits of evil ever found admittance.”
There were the Bannuchi peasants, riven with faction and addicted to assassination. There were the sayuds and other “religious mendicants,” who held mortgages on two-thirds of the land, “sucking the blood of the superstitious people.” There were “the mean Hindu traders, enduring a life of degradation, that they may cheat their Muhommudan employers.” Finally there were the Waziris, the only group in which Edwardes discerned qualities to admire, “half pastoral, half agricultural, wholly without law, but neither destitute of honour or virtue.” By far the most feared of the Pashtun tribes, the Waziris lived in the mountains surrounding Bannu and descended to the plain every winter to graze their livestock and plunder the Bannuchis.
Such was the land; such were its holders. And there was one more thing: before departing for Bannu, Edwardes sent a native spy ahead to draw up a rough map. “He returned with a sheet of paper completely covered over with little squares and lozenges, and a name written in each, with no space between,” recalled Edwardes afterwards.
“Why, Nizamooddeen,” I said, “what is this?”
“That,” he replied triumphantly, “why that’s Bunnoo!”
“And what are all these squares?”
“Oh! those are the forts.”
At the lowest estimate, they numbered no fewer than four hundred. It was, he noted sardonically, “a pleasing prospect” for one entrusted with the district’s subjugation.
Edwardes arrived in Bannu on March 15, accompanied by a force of five hundred Sikh troops. He was twenty-nine years old, a clergyman’s son with a strong evangelical bent. He believed that his ultimate mission in India was nothing short of divine. He had never commanded troops in the field, or distinguished himself in any way during his career in India as a field officer with the 1st Bengal Fusiliers, a European regiment manned mostly by Irishmen. He had come to the attention of both Henry Lawrence and General Hugh Gough, commander in chief of the British forces in India, as the anonymous author of a series of essays devoted to the military and political questions of the day that appeared in the Delhi Gazette in 1845.
Both men agreed with Edwardes’ assessment of the mistakes made in prosecuting the Afghan War. Gough, upon ascertaining the writer’s identity, invited him to join the general staff. Shortly after Edwardes arrived in Delhi, the Sikhs crossed the Sutlej. Edwardes, like most of Gough’s aides, was wounded by gunfire in the war’s opening engagement. He went on to become Henry Lawrence’s personal assistant in Lahore.
With no reputation as a fighting man, Edwardes endeavored on the march to Bannu to secure his fame as a just one. En route from Lahore, he took a hard line against misbehavior by the Sikh troops under his command, who were accustomed to treating such expeditions as ongoing opportunities for plunder. With great ceremony, one of the worst offenders was publicly flogged; Edwardes then assembled the officers and said that the lives of their men depended on the maintenance of discipline, and he would “never overlook” further breaches of it. If the Sikhs refrained from plunder, the force would be received “as friends.” If not, he warned, the “fanatic Bunnoochees” would resort to their “old system” of night attacks, “rushing in on the horror-stricken sentries with juzail [cutlass] and knife, and running amuck among the sleepless Sikh soldiery in the lines.”
Afterwards, noted Edwardes with satisfaction, the “news of the anti-plunder regulations in our camp, spread through the country.” The Bannuchis “flocked into our camp, and bought and sold with our soldiers, and sat and talked in our assemblies, as friends instead of enemies.”
That “the small end of the wedge of civilized intercourse had at last been introduced,” Edwardes wrote in his report to Henry Lawrence, was the “one great object gained” by a six-week expedition that was otherwise a failure. The fractious populace of Bannu refused to pay their taxes or, indeed, any heed at all to the wishes of Lahore. In November, Edwardes returned with instructions from Lawrence to subdue them “by a peaceful and just treaty; and reduce the nominal revenue, which was never paid, to a moderate tribute in acknowledgement of sovereignty.”
After summoning the Bannuchi and Waziri chiefs and elders to a public council at his camp beside the Kurram River, Edwardes moved first to win over the Bannuchis. He meant, he said, to collect the arrears of revenue, build a fort, establish a Sikh garrison, and put their fertile land under a tax collector, “like any part of the Punjab kingdom.” If they assisted him, ten percent of the Bannuchis’ assessments would be divided each year among their chiefs assembled there. “If you do not,” he warned, “I shall depose you and confiscate your estates.”
The majority saw the advantages of coming under the protection of the new regime, and readily agreed. But the Waziris, offered the same terms, proved recalcitrant. Their leader, Sawan Khan, informed Edwardes that Waziris did not pay taxes as a matter of principle.
Without their acquiescence, Edwardes knew, his mission was doomed. The Waziris—who could muster an army of at least fifty thousand men in the vicinity and perhaps three times that many from their tribal territories as a whole—held the balance of power not only in Bannu but across the entire Trans-Indus region. With “peace or war depending on the issue,” he drew a deep breath and proceeded to lecture them in Persian, which was translated into Pashto by an interpreter.
Over the course of twenty-five or thirty years, he began, the Waziris had taken advantage of divisions within the Bannuchis to invade their fertile valley and possess themselves little by little of extensive tracts of land. This occurred at a time of “no law” in Bannu, during which the Bannuchis themselves respected no man’s rights, and acted on the principle that land belonged to whoever was strong enough to seize it. “They cannot complain if you followed their example,” he declared, to warm approval. “Foreigners are always expected to adopt the customs of the country.”
That time, however, was past. Maharaja Duleep Singh had determined to occupy Bannu, and the laws of his kingdom had come into force. Whoever held land in Bannu would have to pay taxes. No favor would be shown to any tribe, great or small, strong or weak. The Waziris, so argued Sawan Khan, had never paid revenue to any king, an argument that held good in their own country, which was still independent.
“If you do not like laws, and paying revenue,” said Edwardes, “you are quite at liberty to give up your lands to the Bunnoochees, from whom you took them, and return to those happy hills where there is no revenue to give and no corn to eat.”
He concluded by assuring the Waziris that he would either make them pay revenue like the Bannuchis or expel them from Bannu. He did not believe that they were fools enough “to forsake in a day the lands which you have been thirty years in conquering, or forego the whole of your rich harvests rather than pay a part.” But the choice was theirs:
“Think over these things deliberately, and then give me a decisive answer, Yes or No.”
After taking their leave from Edwardes, the Waziris met through the night, during which his spies provided updates on the stormy deliberations. Words at all times “ran very high,” and Sawan Khan was accused of selling himself and his tribe to the East India Company. Some called for a local jihad against the infidel Sikhs and their British allies, but most considered the Bannuchis unreliable allies in a holy war. The tension finally broke at midday on December 17, when the chiefs and elders “sternly” returned to make “an unconditional surrender.”
Edwardes wasted no time in producing a copy of his ultimatum and securing signatures from the bemused, illiterate Waziris. Work began the following day on a fortress, located on a plot of high ground overlooking the Bannu bazaar and called Duleepghar, after Duleep Singh. The next order of business was a legal code, promulgated on December 21. In criminal matters, the tenets of Pashtunwali were implicitly rejected. When a murder or a robbery was committed near a village, its inhabitants were held responsible for either producing the culprit or assisting in his apprehension. Suttee, infanticide, and slave dealing were henceforth regarded as crimes, subject to severe penalties. The system of begdree—forced labor—was no longer allowed, and “[n]either may either Hindoo or Muhommudan buy girls any longer by the pound; nor those sacred races who cannot degrade themselves by giving their daughters in marriage to meaner men, be permitted any more to strangle them.”
On January 4, when the walls of the fort’s inner citadel reached “such a height as to form a complete and almost impregnable intrenched position,” Edwardes decided it was time to commence with the leveling of Bannu’s four hundred forts, which he judged “the only really hazardous part of our enterprise.” How to go about it was the question. Henry Lawrence had recommended that they be razed by the occupying troops. But Edwardes felt that their destruction should be carried out by the Bannuchis themselves. Their irritable tempers, he reasoned, were sure to be inflamed by the intrusion of Sikh soldiers into their villages and among their women. After sitting up “hour after hour” that night, trying to decide what to do, he drafted the proclamation that would make him a legend.
Now that just laws were in force, he wrote, it was no longer necessary that each village should be a fort. Every man’s hut was a castle, because no one dared enter it to injure him.
“You are hereby ordered, therefore, to throw down to the ground the walls of every fort and enclosed village within the boundaries of Bunnoo; and I hold the Mullicks [chiefs] responsible for the carrying out of this order within fifteen days.
“At the end of fifteen days I will move against the first fort I see standing, considering the inhabitants as enemies.”
For the first few days after the proclamation was posted, all of Bannu thought Edwardes was joking. Unease followed as his “serious manner” convinced the inhabitants he was in earnest, and everyone waited for their neighbor to make the first move. Reluctance began to ebb after Edwardes sent parties out to report back to him on where demolition work was proceeding and where it was not. As Edwardes followed up with personal inspections, Bannuchis and Waziris alike took up the task with increasing enthusiasm, and local chiefs rushed out to greet him with offerings of fat sheep. By the end of the month, the only fort standing in Bannu bore the name of Duleep Singh.
It was a triumph without parallel in the lawless lands beyond the Indus. In less than three months, without recourse to shot or shell, a lackluster junior officer had succeeded in a conquest “that the fanatic Sikh nation had vainly attempted, with fire and sword, for five-and-twenty years.” In his preface to A Year on the Punjab Frontier, Edwardes explained that his feat had been accomplished “simply,” by means of a balancing act:
“For fear of a Sikh Balancing army, two warlike and independent Mohammedan tribes levelled to the ground, at my bidding, the four hundred forts which constituted the strength of their country, and, for fear of those same Mohammedan tribes, the same Sikh army, at my bidding, constructed a fortress for the Crown, which completed the subjugation of the valley.”
But there was more to it than that. The likes of Sawan Khan would never have persuaded their proud, unruly tribesmen to do Edwardes’ bidding had they not recognized in him a new type of Englishman—as wily in his own way as they were in theirs, but for all that a man who respected them as men and admired their code of honor even as he hewed to the course set by his own. He was, in short, someone they could trust.
The same could be said for the impression made that winter by Lawrence’s other lieutenants. “What days those were!” one of them later remembered. “How Henry Lawrence would send us off to great distances; Edwardes to Bannu, Nicholson to Peshawar, Abbott to Hazara, Lumsden somewhere else . . . giving us a tract of country as big as half of England, and giving us no more helpful directions than these: ‘Settle the country, make the people happy; and take care there are no rows!’”
With minimal armed support, each relied on his personal influence to turn the local tide of anarchy and violence. The tranquility prevailing throughout the Trans-Indus districts by mid-January 1847 was so profound that Henry Lawrence’s brother George brought his wife and children out to live with him in Peshawar, and Henry himself temporarily vacated his post in Lahore to take his first home leave in fifteen years.