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Home History of India since 1823 History of India since 1823, Part 2 |
History of India since 1823, Part 2For two years there was peace, though the Afghans were sulky and sullen. Then, in 1841, came a great disaster. The British agent at Kabul was murdered. At the same time the military stores were captured by the Afghans, and the weak British brigade at Kabul found itself inadequately supplied with food and surrounded by hostile forces. Alter two months' resistance it was forced to negotiate with tin- leader of the Afghans, Dost Mohammed's eldest son, and, under promise of safe-conduct from him, it started in the depth of winter, four thousand strong, and accompanied by twelve thousand of nip-followers, to retire to India. Of this whole number only reached Jelalabad, the nearest British garrison; the rest, except for a few prisoners, perished either from the effect of exposure of the cold or from the knife and the musket of the Afghan. Such a fearful disaster had to be avenged. Two armies marched from India for Kabul, the one by Kandahar, under General Noll, and the other by the Khyber Pass, under General Pollock. They arrived at the capital within a day of each other, burnt the great Tsar, rescued the prisoners, and returned, leaving Dost Mohammed to resume the throne. It is now generally agreed that the British made a mistake in deposing Dost Mohammed and in interfering in Afghanistan. Moreover, the tragic annihilation of the Kabul garrison upset the belief in British invincibility, and was not without its effect upon the subsequent mutiny.The First Afghan War was the beginning of a series of campaigns, which lasted, with little intermission, till the final suppression of the Mutiny in 1859. Difficulties with the rulers of Scinde, as the lower valley of the Indus is called, led to a brilliant campaign against them undertaken by Sir C. Napier. The subsequent annexation was described as "a very advantageous, useful, and humane piece of rascality", giving, as it did, for the first time the benefits of a strong and honest administration to the inhabitants. Our next war arose as a consequence of the death of the "Lion of the Punjab", as Ranjit Singh was called. He had been careful to keep on good terms with the British Government, but on his death, in 1839, there was no strong man to succeed him. Consequently there came a period of turbulence and anarchy inseparable from a series of disputed successions. Finally, a military committee became supreme, and proceeded to invade British territory. War therefore became inevitable. The inhabitants of the Punjab were mainly Sikhs, who were members of a Hindoo "religious sect founded in the fifteenth century; and Ranjit Singh had recruited from amongst these Sikhs an army of some eighty thousand, who have been compared for their steadiness and religious zeal to Cromwell's famous "Ironsides". The two Sikh wars were consequently the most formidable and stubborn that the British had to fight during the whole course of their conquest of India. In the first war (1845) tne British won four pitched battles in three weeks, one of them, that of Ftrozshah, being described as "the most bloody and obstinate contest ever fought by Anglo-Indian troops". That war ended in an unsatisfactory peace, and hostilities soon reopened. In the second war (1848-9) the first battle was at Chilianwallah he-re the British, though they managed to take the Sikli position, lost two thousand four hundred men killed and wounded, besides four guns and the colours of three regiments. A splendid victory, however, at Gujerat five weeks later destroyed the Sikh army. For the first two hours the artillery was used with splendid effect, and then a general advance carried the Sikh position. "We stood two hours in hell, " so a Sikh described the battle, "and then we saw six miles of infantry" In both wars the commander-in-chief was Lord Gough. No one has ever doubted his bravery and persistence. But his conduct of the war was much attacked at the time. His "Tipperary tactics" - he came from County Tipperary-were condemned as precipitate, and he was too fond of frontal attacks with the bayonet to make sufficient use of flank movements and artillery fire. His last victory was, however, a fine achievement. The victory at Gujerat left the British masters of the Punjab. The country was annexed; and some of the most capable men in India, including Henry and John Lawrence, were sent to govern it. They inaugurated a period of peace and good government, which increased the prosperity and happiness of all the inhabitants. Consequently, when the Mutiny of 1857 broke out, the Punjab remained not merely passively quiescent but actively loyal. The Second Sikh War iku! been fought whilst Lord Dalhousie was governor-general, and hi: was responsible for the annexation of the Punjab. But the Punjab was not the only extension of British territory which look place during his rule of eight years (1848-56). Outrages upon British merchants and insults to the British flag necessitated a fresh war with Burmah in 1852, and led to the annexation of Lower Burnt ah and the mouths of the lrawaddy River. The misgovernment of Oudh by its rulers had been so scandalous that the East India Company sent orders for its annexation, which Dalhousie carried out in 1856. Moreover, Lord Dalhousie himself was strongly of opinion that the direct rule of the British was much superior to native rule; and he consequently refused, in certain cases, to sanction the old custom by which Hindoo princes who had. no children of their own might adopt heirs to succeed them. Thus, when the rulers of Nagpur and of Jhansi, in Central India, died without direct heirs, their territories "lapsed" to the Company. So far we have been concerned with the extension of the British control in India, but it must not be supposed that the efforts of British rulers were not directed to bettering the lot of their subjects. On the contrary, especially during the governorship of Lord William Bentinck (1828-35) and Lord Dalhousie (1848-56), great reforms were made. The former abolished suttee, as the compulsory suicide of Hindoo widows on the death of their husbands was called (During one year in Bengal alone no less than eight hundred widows were burnt to death); suppressed the thugs, bands of hereditary assassins who roamed about India strangling travellers; encouraged educated natives to take a share in the government; made important financial reforms; and initiated a measure for giving liberty of the press. The latter reorganized the internal administration of India; developed canals, introduced the telegraph, the railway, and cheap postage; and encouraged education. Indeed Lord Dalhousie must be regarded, whether as empire builder or reformer, as one of the greatest of our proconsuls. Lord Dalhousie's policy, however, was one cause of the Indian Mutiny in 1857. Western reforms mystified and unsettled the Eastern mind, and natives thought that the world' was being turned upside down. To many natives the telegraph was magic, whilst the railway threatened the caste system because people of different castes had to travel together in the same carriage. It was even thought that all British projects of reform had but one design—the destruction of the Hindoo religion. Again, the annexation policy of Lord Dalhousie, though undertaken with the best intentions, had aroused distrust. It was unfortunate, moreover, that Lord Canning, Lord Dalhousie's successor, was not made aware of the peculiar conditions of land tenure in Oudh, and that his subordinates aroused the hostility of the great landowners in that province by a settlement of the land which did the landed aristocracy grievous injustice. Consequently, in the Mutiny, the landowners of Oudh were against the British. But there were other causes of the Mutiny. It was primarily a mutiny of the Sepoys, and the causes were largely military. The native troops outnumbered the British by eight to one; they thought that the success of the British was due to them, and their opinion of British invincibility had been shaken by the Afghan and subsequently by the Crimean War. Moreover, an old prophecy that the rule of the British would end one hundred years after the Battle of Plassey was not without its effect The occasion for the Mutiny arose, however, when the Enfield rifle was substituted for "Brown Bess" In those days the soldier had to bite the cartridge with his teeth, and the report spread like wildfire that the cartridges for the new rifle were smeared with the fat of cows and the lard of pigs. The cow was sacred to the Hindoos, whilst the pig was an abomination to the Mohammedans. The story may have had some slight foundation of truth in it.1 At all events the Sepoys believed it, and the agitators against British rule thus found a ready illustration of the deceitful designs of the British upon the sacred religions of the Indian peoples, and a cry which united the Hindoo and the Mohammedan in a common opposition. |
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