Sahib: The British Soldier in India 1750–1914. Richard Holmes
Indian equivalent of sahib, was popular in Madras.
For the purposes of this book sahib is used in its broadest sense to mean all British soldiers serving in India, from sahib-log of the most refined sort, to gora-log, red of face and coat, intent on mischief in the bazaar. This account is firmly based on their own writings, in the form of letters home and diaries – a respectable stream of which is preserved in the Oriental and India Office Collections of the British Library and the National Army Museum. As far as printed sources are concerned, in addition to examining such well-known accounts as Frederick Roberts’s Forty-One Years in India and Garnet Wolseley’s The Story of a Soldier’s Life, I was able, thanks largely to that wonderful repository of the long-forgotten, the Prince Consort Library in Aldershot, to use far scarcer memoirs such as W. G. Osborne’s The Court and Camp of Runjeet Singh and James Wood’s Gunner at Large. There are fewer accounts here by private soldiers and NCOs than I would have wished, but Privates Waterfield and Ryder carry their muskets with HM’s 32nd Foot, and Sergeant John Pearman plies his sabre with HM’s 3rd Light Dragoons. I have also included the experiences of the men’s families – the women who followed them from camp to camp, bore their children, nursed them as they died, and all too often died themselves. The inimitable John Shipp, twice commissioned from the ranks, makes his appearance, and that staunch freemason, Sergeant Major George Carter, tells of life in 2nd Bengal Fusiliers. We also have Subadar Sita Ram – who served with a regiment of the Bengal Native Infantry in the first half of the nineteenth century – on hand to give us his own view of the British army in India:
There were eight English officers in my regiment, and the Captain of my company was a real sahib – just as I had imagined all sahibs to be. His name was ‘Burrumpeel’. He was six feet three inches tall, his chest was as broad as the monkey god’s, and he was tremendously strong. He often used to wrestle with the sepoys and won universal admiration when he was in the wrestling arena. He had learnt all the throws and no sepoy could defeat him. This officer was always known amongst ourselves as the ‘Wrestler’. Nearly all our officers had nicknames by which we knew them. One was the ‘Prince’ sahib, and another was known as the ‘Camel’ because he had a long neck. Another we called ‘Damn’ sahib because he always said that word when he gave an order.10
Three categories of British soldiers served in India. Firstly, there were what we might now call mercenaries, serving Indian rulers in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, although the term mercenary then had few of its modern pejorative connotations, and ‘soldiers of fortune’ would be a kinder description. Next, there were officers and NCOs of the East India Company’s native regiments, and officers, NCOs and men of the Company’s Europeans, regiments such as the Bengal Fusiliers and the Bengal Horse Artillery. All of these folk had made a conscious decision to serve in India, though many of them lived to regret it: the diarist and sybarite William Hickey no sooner arrived there as a junior officer in the Company’s service than he set off back to England only to reappear in India as a civilian, less trammelled by rules and regulations.
Finally there were regiments of the British army, horse and foot, who served in India for terms ranging from a few years to more than twenty-five. To distinguish them from local units they bore the prefix HM’s in front of their regimental number – such as HM’s 31st and HM’s 50th who fought so hard in the wars against the Sikhs in 1845–46 and 1848–49. Some of their officers had often deliberately exchanged into regiments that were bound for India, where living was cheap and rich pickings beckoned, eighteenth-century India being known, after a coin long current in the south, as ‘the land of the pagoda tree’, which simply had to be shaken to rain money.
The ordinary soldier, however, had little choice but to follow his regiment wherever it was posted. In 1839, Private Charles Goodward (whose stocky build gave him the nickname ‘Tubb’) arrived in India to join HM’s 16th Lancers, a regiment which had already been there for sixteen years and seemed likely to stay a good deal longer.
It was a disappointment … felt by the Regiment … after all our hopes … of our near return to dear … old England to find … that yet another campaign was in store for us … when at last orders from the Governor-General were read to us, stating that in the present state of the Country he could not deem it expedient to send the 16th Lancers home.11
Although these three categories of soldier were organisationally distinct, there was a good deal of migration between them. James Skinner started his military career as a mercenary and died a British officer, while Captain Felix Smith, late of HM’s 36th Regiment, was mortally wounded under the command of one of the most remarkable of all the soldiers of fortune, George Thomas, a Tipperarian who had probably deserted from the Royal Navy and went on to establish his own state, ruled from his eponymously named fortress, Georgegarh. Some British soldiers were persuaded, by a substantial bounty, to transfer from HM’s service to the Company’s when their regiments left India. Conversely, the so-called ‘White Mutiny’ of 1859–61 arose when soldiers in the Company’s service declined to consider themselves re-enlisted into the British army when the Crown assumed full responsibility for India. Henry Havelock was a British officer but spent almost all his career in India; Frederick Roberts was a Bengal artilleryman who won his Victoria Cross in suppressing the Indian Mutiny and met his end, a field marshal and a peer, on the Western Front in 1914.
For most of this period, British people living in India spoke of themselves as Anglo-Indian, but the term has now generally come to refer to people of mixed race, or Eurasians. These folk were karani-log to native Indians, and Walter Lawrence observed that in his time ‘they are no longer called Eurasians but “Anglo-Indians” … I fear that the change of name will not improve the lot of this luckless and unprotected people’, squeezed in the vice between two cultures, fully trusted by neither side, and mocked for their use of English. Even the otherwise generous Lawrence noted that ‘I heard a mother saying of her two daughters: “She is a dull, and she is a naughty’”.12 The term ‘half caste’ went from being a blunt description to an insult. Andrew, one of Sir John Bennet Hearsey’s mixed-race children, horse-whipped the editor of The Pioneer for publishing an article by none other than the young Kipling, in which he was thus described. ‘It is false,’ yelled Hearsey;
I will have my proper people treated with proper respect, and called by their proper name, and that is Anglo-Indians. The descendants of the Saxons and British were called Anglo-Saxons, their descendants with the Normans were called Anglo-Normans, and we are therefore Anglo-Indians.13
The change in status of the Anglo-Indian owed much to a wider change in attitudes that separated Georgian gentlemen, who often raised their mixed-race children with pride, from the Victorians who were much more sniffy about such things. Matters were hardly helped when, in 1792, the Court of Directors of the Honourable East India Company decided to debar mixed-race men from its service. ‘No person, the son of a native Indian,’ ran its decree, ‘shall henceforth be appointed by this court to appointments in the Civil, Military or Marine Services of the company.’ Eventually mixed-race men were allowed to serve as bandsmen or farriers, but while Indians could serve as native officers, with ranks such as jemadar and subadar, combatant military service was closed to sons of the very frequent liaisons between British men and Indian women.
Perhaps the most outstanding mixed-race figure in British India was the aforementioned Lieutenant Colonel James Skinner, born in 1778, who was proud to acknowledge that:
My father was a native of Scotland, in the Company’s service; my mother was a Rajpootree, the daughter of a zamindar … who was taken prisoner at the age of fourteen … My father then an ensign into whose hands she fell, treated her with great kindness, and she bore him six children, three girls and three boys. The former were all married to gentlemen in the Company’s service; my elder brother, David, went to sea; I myself became a soldier, and my younger brother, Robert, followed my example.14
Despite services