Some attempt has already been made to explain the KJ views and circumstances under which, after Lord Wellesley’s departure, the British government determined to retire within its own administrative borders, to transact its political affairs in future upon the principle of limited liability, and to maintain, outside its actual obligations, the attitude of a placid spectator, unconcerned with the quarrels or misfortunes of his neighbours. It is a policy which a strong European state, placed in the midst of uncivilized rulers or races, has vainly endeavoured to uphold from time immemorial. It appears at first to be simple and prudent, and to be dictated by enlightened self-interest and by public morality. Unfortunately, it has hitherto invariably failed to do more than check or postpone for an interval the really inevitable tendency of an organized power to override, if not to absorb, loose tribal ruler-ships and ephemeral despotisms, which spring up and survive merely because more ‘durable institutions are wanting and until they are supplied. Not only, indeed,
is the check temporary, the reaction is apt to produce a rebound; a halt is followed by a great stride forward, a few steps taken backward look like preparation for a longer leap; so that masterly inactivity is attributed to astute calculation, and we are often unjustly accused in India of allowing the pear to rot that it may drop the easier into our hands.
It is usual to lay the blame of this invariable expansion upon those who direct imperial affairs on the frontier or in the outlying provinces, but the true impulse comes quite as often from the metropolis, where the accumulation of capital, or the pressure of national interests, drives war and enterprise forward along the line of least resistance. This onward movement may be temporarily arrested by such physical obstacles as mountains or deserts, but it comes to a standstill only when the way is at last blocked by a rival power of equal calibre, or when the central forces begin to decline. The truth is that in the art of political engineering solid construction depends on the material available and on the proper adaptation of resistance to natural pressure. It is as impossible to lay down a frontier on an untenable line as to throw a dam across a river on bad foundations. The dam is carried away at the next flood; nor will the strictest prudence long maintain a frontier or a system that does not run upon the natural lines of political or territorial permanency.
When, therefore, at the beginning of the nineteenth century we drew back from what seemed to Lord Cornwallis a network of embarrassing ties and compromising
Bakhlawar Singh's Cenotaph at Ulwar in Rajputana
guarantees, we retained, as has been said, certain great states within the sphere of our surveillance; but we left almost all Central India, including Rajputana, to take care of itself. All round our own territories we drew a cordon of rigid irresistible order; while outside this ring-fence, in the great interior region that contained the principalities of the Maratha families and of the ancient Rajput chiefs, we allowed a free hand to Sindhia, Holkar, and the predatory leaders. Scattered among the Maratha territories were a crowd of tribal chiefships and petty feudatories in various stages of dependence. Beyond the Maratha border, toward the great western desert, lay the Rajput states, too weak and disunited to oppose the exactions and dilapidations of great predatory armies.
This group of primitive tribal chiefships, the last surviving relics of mediaeval India, had outlasted the Afghan and the Moghul empires, and had weathered the tumultuous anarchy of the eighteenth century. But they were rent by intestine feuds, and the militia of the Rajput clans was quite incapable of resisting the trained bands of the Marathas or the Afghan mercenaries of Amir Khan. Some of these states were now remonstrating earnestly with the British government for refusing to admit them within its protectorate, which they claimed as a matter of right; so that, as Sir Charles Metcalfe, the Resident for Rajputana, wrote in June, 1816, “They said that some power in India had always existed to which peaceable states submitted, and in return obtained its protection against the invasions of upstart chiefs and the armies of lawless banditti; that the British government now occupied the place of that protecting power, and was the natural guardian of weak states which were continually exposed to the cruelties and oppression of robbers and plunderers, owing to the refusal of the British government to protect them.”
Lord Minto, who had gone out to India with the intention of maintaining what was called the defensive policy, changed his views materially before 1813, when he made over the Governor-Generalship to Lord Moira, afterwards Marquis of Hastings. He had found himself compelled to interpose with an armed force for the protection of Holkar’s government against a captain of banditti, and to place an army in the field to
overawe the freebooter Amir Khan, who was about to overrun the Nagpur country. From 1811 to 1813 the Pindaris increased rapidly in numbers. The origin of these famous bands is to be found in the scouts and foragers who had always formed the loose fringe, so to speak, of every Indian army, receiving no pay, and subsisting by pillage, but generally submitting to the orders of the commander of the whole force.
As the regular armies of the native states were reduced, and as the governments lost strength, these bands detached themselves from all military or civil subordination and set up as hordes of free lances under their own leaders. By this time they had invaded, plundered, and ransomed the territories of the Nizam and the Peshwa, the allies of the British, and now they were threatening with fire and sword the rich English province of Behar. The principle of non-interference seems to have been defended upon the ground that all these jarring and complicated elements of disorder would gradually settle down and become fused into strong and solidly constituted states. But it soon became manifest that an attempt to confine epidemic disease within fixed areas in the midst of some populous country would be not much more unreasonable than the plan of allowing political disorders to breed and multiply in the centre of India.
In the first place the Maratha chiefs were sullen, discontented, naturally ill-disposed toward the government which had recently overthrown their predominance, and seeking by all means to repair and augment
their military forces. Secondly, the enforcement of systematic order all round them, and of restriction within fixed boundaries, was irreconcilable with the conditions that had engendered their power and that were still necessary to its existence; for the :Maratha princes could maintain large armies only by levying exactions from their neighbours and by constantly taking the field upon marauding excursions. And, thirdly, it was evident that the cessation of irregular warfare and the establishment of a steady protectorate over the greater portion of India must inevitably aggravate the sufferings and intensify the confusion in those parts where the supreme pacifying authority disclaimed jurisdiction and formally abdicated every right of interference. Large bodies of troops were disbanded by the British government and by its allies. But as all this multitude of men who lived by the sword and the free lance found their occupation gone within the pale of orderly government, they poured out of the pacified districts into the kingdoms of misrule like water draining from a cultivated upland into the low-lying marshes.
It was indeed impossible that a kind of political Alsatia, full of brigands and roving banditti, could long be tolerated in the midst of a country just settling down into the peaceful and industrious stage. Such a situation, nevertheless, necessarily followed upon the introduction of the new principle by a sharp turn of policy. The British government could not now stay at home or stand aloof without stopping halfway in the pacification of India and leaving one great homogeneous
Ruins of Tyre, the ancient Phoenician city on the Mediterranean
population under two different and entirely incompatible political systems. For although the Indian people are broken up into diversities of race and language, they are, as a whole, not less distinctly marked off from the rest of Asia by certain material and moral characteristics than is their country by the mountains and the sea. The component parts of that great country hang together, physically and politically; there is no more room for two irreconcilable systems of government than in Persia, China, or Asiatic Turkey.
The attitude of insulation might not have been inconsistent in the infancy of the English dominion, when the forces of the native states were better divided and more equally balanced, and when we might have confined our enterprise to the establishment of a great maritime and commercial power on the shores of the Indian and Arabian seas, like the Phoenicians or the Venetians in the Mediterranean. But it has been seen that, during the second half of the eighteenth century, England penetrated inland, striking in among the local
wars and seizing territory, in order to protect herself and forestall the French. Then, before the last apprehensions of French rivalry had vanished, she had been confronted by the Marathas and the Mysore rulers, whose natural jealousy of her rising power was abetted by the French, and whose well-appointed armies directly threatened her position.
To meet this danger Lord Wellesley had organized subsidiary forces on a large scale, undertaking on the part of the British government the general defence of all states that submitted to England’s political influence, and confining within fixed boundaries all those that held aloof. Lastly, when Mysore and the Maratha confederacy – the two powers that made head against the British – had been the one destroyed and the other disabled, England’s ascendency so overshadowed all India that it was too late to descend from the height she had attained or to stand still abruptly on the road to universal dictatorship. She had now become a conquering power; she had assumed a continental sovereignty; and upon her the duty of providing the police of India had manifestly fallen. When the British attempted to disclaim this responsibility, no one else could undertake the business; and the smaller chief-ships, who saw themselves spoiled and devoured, protested against a government that had pre-occupied the imperial place, but nevertheless evaded the imperial obligation.
In the meantime the condition of the whole central region was sinking from bad to worse. It has been
seen that India was crowded in the eighteenth century with mercenary soldiers who followed the trade of war; and an incredibly large proportion of the population subsisted by freebooting, a flourishing profession that had now openly been practised in India for several generations. The annexations and conquests of Lord Wellesley’s era and the enlargement of the British borders and of the British protectorate had led to an extensive disbandment of troops. It was reckoned by a competent authority that, at a moderate computation, this wide pacification of the country had turned loose half a million professional soldiers.
Many of these men, with most of the freebooting class, whose occupation was disappearing with the con-traction of that field of private enterprise, had collected in Central India, where, instead of diminishing and settling down as had been expected, they increased to an alarming degree. Some of the native rulers encouraged them secretly, they intimidated the rest, and no power was strong enough to suppress them. The swarming of these predatory bands, which had been a comparatively transient and occasional evil when they could range over the whole Indian continent, became a mortal plague when it was hemmed in within set bounds, for the inland countries were exhausted by endemic brigandage. While the lesser principalities were thus being systematically bled to death, the great military chiefs were recruiting their forces, replenishing their treasuries, and enlarging the range of their operations, not without some prospect of recovering the formidable
military footing which they had lost in the previous war.
The subsidiary system, moreover, had other consequences besides those of causing the disbanding of the loose mercenary militia and the condensation of the freebooting plague. As the military power of the states which contracted these treaties was conveyed into British hands, the result was to weaken the internal authority of their rulers, by diminishing their feeling of responsibility for governing well and moderately, because they were sure of English protection in the event of attack or revolt. Undoubtedly the sense of dependence upon a higher power relaxed the energies of a native prince, who knew that in the last resort he could always call in the British government to save him from utter destruction.
Against these disadvantages of the subsidiary alliances must, however, be set the consideration that without British protection most of the allied states would certainly have been dismembered in the incessant warfare that prevailed wherever they were left to themselves. The effect of English alliances upon the majority of these states was, therefore, to arrest the natural process of their disruption, but not to strengthen the internal authority of their rulers. In this manner the burden of repressing disorder within the territory of England’s allies followed the transfer of the duty of external defence and gradually became shifted to the shoulders of the British government. Her policy might vary, backward or forward, but England still found
herself mounting step by step up to the high office of ultimate arbiter in every dispute and supreme custodian of the peace of all India.
Under the circumstances that have just been described, the marauding bands of Central India, like the Free Companies of medieval Europe, had prospered and multiplied; until in 1814 Amir Khan, a notable military adventurer, was living upon Rajputana with a compact army of at least thirty thousand men and a strong artillery. That a regular army of this calibre should have been moving at large about Central India, entirely unconnected with any recognizable government or fixed territory, and acknowledging no political or civil responsibility, is decisive evidence of the prevailing disorganization. But Amir Khan’s troops were under some kind of discipline and were employed upon a system in some degree resembling regular warfare, their commander’s aim being to carve out a dominion for himself.
The true Pindari hordes had no other object but general rapine; they were immense bands of mounted robbers; their most popular leader, Chitu, could number no less than ten thousand horsemen; they could subsist only by irruptions into rich and fertile districts; and they were a perpetual menace to the country possessed or protected by the British power. It cannot be doubted that they maintained a secret understanding with the independent Maratha rulers at Poona, Nagpur, and Gwalior, who were not particularly anxious to join in the suppression of armed bodies that
spared Maratha districts while they harried British lands and the Nizam’s country, and who probably remembered that the Pindaris might prove very serviceable auxiliaries in any future attempt to make head against British domination.
The war that broke out with Nepal in 1814 had inspired the Marathas with some hope of finding their opportunity in England’s difficulty. About 1768 a chief of the Gurkhalis or Gurkhas, a race springing from the intermixture of Hindus with the hill tribes, had subdued all the highlands and valleys on the southern slopes of the Himalayas overlooking Bengal. His successors had carried their arms north-westwards along the mountain ranges above Oudh, Rohilkhand, and the provinces watered by the Ganges and the Jumna, up to the confines of the Panjab. This difficult tract of hill and forest, into which the Moghuls had never cared to penetrate, had previously been possessed by a number of petty Hindu rajas, who subsisted to a large extent by making occasional forays into the plain country below.
The Gurkha chief, taking his lesson from what was going on in Bengal, had set up a disciplined force with which he easily exterminated the local rajas, and his dynasty ruled, with the usual contests upon each succession, until his grandson was assassinated by conspirators in 1805. After that date the kingdom was no longer governed by a single ruler; it fell into the hands of a group of high military officers belonging to the dominant clan, who kept the hereditary king in subjection
and governed Nepal in his name. As their soldiery were drilled and equipped in European fashion – for in military matters the Gurkhas have always been skilful copyists from the English model – they rapidly pushed their conquests westward over the petty hill states, and soon began to make encroachments upon the sub-Himalayan lowlands within the English border. Between the minor chiefs who lived on the skirts of the mountains and the great proprietors in Bengal there had been chronic fighting from time immemorial, for all these Nepalese border chiefs had annexed strips of land in the plains immediately below them; but now the Gurkhas had subdued all the highlands and the English had brought the low country under their authority.
It followed that the constant quarrels over this debatable border soon embroiled the two governments. The Nepalese officers on the frontier encroached audaciously upon the lands of British subjects, occupied tracts belonging to Bengal, and refused to retire. At last, when they seized two small districts in 1814, Lord Hastings sent to their government a peremptory demand that they should evacuate, and on receiving merely evasive replies, he re-occupied these districts by a detachment of troops, before whom the Gurkha officers quietly retired. But so soon as the troops had been withdrawn, the Gurkhas made a sudden attack upon the British police stations and massacred some twenty men. Their government, after holding a formal council, had resolved upon war, being persuaded that
A Nepalese shield
the English could never penetrate into the mountains of Nepal.
Then ensued the first of those numerous expeditions into the interior of the great hill-ranges surrounding India, in which the Anglo-Indian government has ever since been at intervals engaged.
The frontier which was to be the scene of war stretched for a distance of about six hundred miles, and the enemy had the command of all the passes leading up into the highlands. The attack was made by the English at three separate points; and although General Gillespie was repulsed and killed in attempting to storm a fort, yet in spite of a brave and obstinate resistance, the British troops gained their footing within the hills and drove the
Gurkhas out of all their positions on the west. The Nepalese government was compelled to sign a treaty ceding a long strip of the lower Himalayas, with most of the adjacent forest lands, extending from the present western frontier of the Nepal state north-westward as far as the Sutlaj River. All the hill-country that now overhangs Rohilkhand and the Northwest Provinces up to the Jumna River, with the valuable belt of low-lying forest that skirts the base of the outer ranges toward India, thus fell into English hands.
By this cession of a Himalayan province the Anglo-Indian frontier was carried up to and beyond the watershed of the highest mountains separating India from Tibet or from Cathay; and the English dominion thenceforward became conterminous for the first time with the Chinese empire, whose government has ever since observed British proceedings with marked and intelligible solicitude. The Gurkha chiefs of Nepal, having thus been confined within a narrow belt of highland territory immediately overlooking England’s most valuable province, have nevertheless maintained their system of military domination through several internal revolutions, and have sedulously pursued a policy of training their troops upon the European model by discipline and the importation of arms.
In the meantime the freebooting bands of Central India were increasing in numbers and audacity. The Pindaris, who were openly disowned and secretly encouraged by the Maratha chiefs, had made an inroad into certain districts of the Madras Presidency, carrying
off great booty, and had also plundered on the frontier of Bengal. Amir Khan, the Pathan leader, was besieging Jaipur, whose raja applied to the English for succour. After much negotiation Lord Hastings succeeded not only in bringing the Rajput state of Jaipur within the English protectorate, but also in concluding a subsidiary treaty with the Bhonsla Raja of Nagpur, whereby an important member was detached from the Maratha confederation. But this raja soon repented an engagement which affected his complete independence; and under the influence of a party at his capital hostile to the English, he began to correspond secretly with the Peshwa at Poona, who had become restless, disaffected, and exceedingly impatient of British mediation in his dealings with feudatories or neighbouring states.
The war in Nepal, which seemed likely to be long and troublesome, encouraged an inclination among the Marathas to try conclusions again with the English. The Peshwa began to assemble his troops and collect military stores; the British Resident replied by calling in the subsidiary force; and a kind of sporadic insurrection, privily fomented by the Poona authorities, was breaking out in the country. All these threatening symptoms reached a crisis when the Gaikwar’s envoy, who had been sent to Poona on a special mission under British guarantee, was assassinated, with the Peshwa’s connivance, by one of his confidential favourites. The murderer’s surrender was extorted from the Peshwa, with the greatest difficulty, by the British Resident,
but he escaped from prison, and the Peshwa, who seemed about to take up arms in his defence, only lost courage and made terms just as an open rupture was becoming imminent. In 1817 he signed a treaty making cessions of territory in exchange for an increased subsidiary force, and virtually renouncing all his previous pretensions to supremacy in the Maratha con-federation.
Lord Hastings now decided that the time had come when he could begin his combined operations for the suppression of the freebooting hordes, and for such a general reformation of the condition of Central India as might eradicate the predatory system. The policy of isolation had, he found, completely failed; its effect was not only to foster the spread of confusion and disorder outside the Anglo-Indian frontiers, but also to endanger the main position of the British government. His remedy was to step forward as the arbitrator and authoritative peacemaker, to dissolve the plundering bands, and to mark out the whole of the vast inland region into recognized rulerships, so that no part of it should be left outside the jurisdiction of some responsible authority. He relied on the supreme influence and paramount power of the British government in arms to insist, when this had been done, upon the pacification of the whole country through the chiefs to whom it should have been assigned in severalty. He projected, in short, the consummation of the work that had been begun by Lord Cornwallis, and carried very far by Lord Wellesley – the extension of British supremacy
and protectorate over every native state in the interior of India.
In such a cause, however, the hearty co-operation of the Maratha princes could not reasonably be expected. Amir Khan, the Pathan leader, was persuaded or intimidated into disbanding his army and settling down on the lands guaranteed to him. But Sindhia reluctantly agreed to associate himself with the campaign against the Pindaris; he delayed the departure of his troops with the manifest purpose of watching events, and was overawed into signing a treaty of cooperation only by the display of force. The Peshwa, galled by the yoke which the recent treaty had fixed upon him, collected his forces and broke out into open hostility, attacking the British troops at Poona in November, 1817; while at Nagpur the raja declared for him as the head of the Maratha nation and sent his own troops against the British Residency. On both occasions the Marathas were repulsed, though not without stout fighting at Nagpur; and as Holkar’s army, which attempted to join the Peshwa, had been defeated at Mehidpur in December of the previous year, the opposition of the Maratha powers to the Governor-General’s policy of pacification soon came to an end.
The Peshwa, pursued by the British flying columns, fought one or two sharp actions; but his troops were at last scattered, his forts were taken, and he himself was pursued until he finally surrendered in June, 1818, upon an assurance of suitable provision. Lord Hastings had determined to exclude him and his family from
Peasants of Mahableshwar, near Satara, in the Bombay Presidency
any further share of influence or dominion in the Deccan; and the greater part of his territories passed under British sovereignty. The State of Satara was reconstituted out of the Peshwa’s domains and placed under the descendant of Sivaji, the original founder of the Maratha empire, whose dynasty had been supplanted by the Peshwas, a line of hereditary prime ministers.
The Nagpur State had also to cede several important districts, and its military establishments passed under British control. The group of ancient Rajput chief-ships which had been spoiled and ransomed for years by the Marathas and Amir Khan, with a number of minor principalities, were placed under the immediate protection and guarantee of the British government.
The tributes claimed from the lesser states by the Maratha rulers were fixed and confirmed, upon conditions that payment should be made through the British treasury.
By these measures the Maratha rulership of the Peshwa was now finally extinguished, and the three leading families that had so often opposed the British, Sindhia, Holkar, and the Bhonsla of Nagpur, were definitely bound over to keep the peace of India. The Pindaris, who were merely the remnants of the once flourishing predatory system, the dregs of the roving bands that had harried India during a century of anarchy, were dispersed or exterminated. The Maratha states were restricted to carefully demarcated limits; the trades of marauding conquest and of mere brigandage on a large scale alike disappeared; the whole species vanished with the change of those conditions of government and society by which it had been engendered.
The result was to secure for the British provinces unbroken immunity from the hostile attacks or plundering inroads to which they were always exposed so long as rapine and violence thrived in the centre of India. But it would have been useless to put down these enormous evils unless precautions had also been taken against their revival. Henceforward it became the universal principle of public policy that every state in India (outside the Panjab and Sind) should make over the control of its foreign relations to the British government, should submit all external disputes to British arbitration, and should defer to British advice
regarding internal management so far as might be necessary to cure disorders or scandalous misrule. A British Resident was appointed to the courts of all the greater princes as the agency for the exercise of these high functions; while the subsidiary forces and the contingents furnished by the states placed the supreme military command everywhere under British direction.
This great political settlement of Central India – the disarmament and pacification of the military chiefships, and the adjustment of distinct relations of supremacy and subordination – established universal recognition of the cardinal principle upon which the fabric of British dominion in India has been built up. It completed and consolidated the policy of Lord Wellesley. The last shadow of interference by any European rival had now for the time faded away. The contest with the native states for ascendency was finally decided, and not only the right but the duty of intervention for the security and tranquillity of the Indian people was now everywhere acknowledged, from the two seas northward up to Sind and the Sutlaj River. From the Sind frontier at the mouths of the Indus River, down the west coast of the peninsula to Cape Comorin, and thence north-eastward again along the Bay of Bengal to the frontier of Burma, the whole sea-line of India was under the authority of England. On the north she held a long belt of the Himalayan highlands, and her political jurisdiction extended to the western edge of the deserts bordering on upper Sind and the Panjab.
The largest, most important, and by far the most valuable portion of this region was now under the direct administration of the British; the rest was under their sovereign influence. Taking the natural boundaries of India to be the ocean and the mountains; it may be said that the Anglo-Indian Empire now commanded the whole circuit of its sea frontier, that it was securely settled upon a base in the Himalayas, and that its western flank was covered to a great extent by the cis-Indus desert. On two sections, and two only, the frontier was still unstable and liable to disturbance – on the northeast, where the Burmese were advancing into Assam, and on the north-west, where the Sikh kingdom beyond the Sutlaj had acquired formidable fighting strength under Ranjit Singh.
This collection transcribed by Chris Gage