There was a death-like silence over the scene at this time, and, overcome with horror, my heart seemed almost to cease beating … At the guns the culprits were handed over to the artillery-men, who, prepared with strong ropes in their hands, seized their victims. Each of these, standing erect, was bound to a cannon and tightly secured, with the small of the back covering the muzzle. And then all at once the silence which reigned around was broken by the oaths and yells of those about to die.
The sounds were not uttered by men afraid of death, for they showed the most stoical indifference, but were the long-suppressed utterances of dying souls, who, in the bitterness of their hearts, cursed those who had been instrumental in condemning them to this shameful end. They one and all poured out maledictions on our heads; and in their language, one most rich in expletives, they exhausted the whole vocabulary.
Meanwhile the gunners stood with lighted port-fires, waiting for the word of command to fire and launch the sepoys into eternity.
These were still yelling and roaring abuse, some even looking over their shoulders and watching without emotion the port-fires about to be applied to the touch-holes when the word ‘Fire’ sounded from the officer in command, and part of the tragedy was at an end.
A thick cloud of smoke issued from the muzzles of the cannons, through which were distinctly seen by several of us the black heads of the victims, thrown many feet into the air …
All this time a sickening, offensive smell pervaded the air, a stench which only those who have been present at scenes such as this can realise – the pungent odour of burnt human flesh.
The artillerymen had neglected putting up back-boards to their guns, so that, horrible to relate, at each discharge the recoil threw back pieces of burning flesh, bespattering the men and covering them with blood and calcified remains.
Some of the remains were thrown 200 yards, and one native spectator was killed and two wounded.35 Minnie Wood came upon the abundant evidence of executions while on an evening drive at Jhelum in July 1857, and though she was horrified when she ‘thought of them being so fearfully deprived of life … had I not escaped that morning from my house, they would have killed me’.36
After about 1800, European soldiers were spared this dreadful mode of execution, and were instead subjected to gallows or firing party, depending on the nature of their crime. Flogging was in use in the British army until 1868, though it could be administered for offences committed on campaign till 1881 and in military prisons till 1907. There was a steady decrease in both its frequency and severity. In the late 1820s the army flogged about one in fifty of its soldiers every year, and this had fallen to one in 189 by 1845. In 1807, 1,000 lashes was established as a maximum, save in cases where the offender would otherwise have been executed, and this was reduced to 200 lashes in 1836, fifty lashes in 1847 and twenty-five in 1879. Flogging in India was more than usually controversial because it was abolished in the Indian army by Lord William Bentinck in 1835. For a ten-year period, until its restoration in 1845 by Lord Hardinge, British troops in India could be flogged but Indians could not.
However, the punishment was never the same for both races. If it was relatively common amongst British soldiers, it was very rare amongst Indians: there were only thirty-five serious cases of crime in the Bengal infantry, a force averaging 55,000 men, in 1825–33, and, significantly, none of these were drink-related. An Indian soldier could only be flogged after the sentence was approved by the major general commanding his district. He would inevitably be discharged when the punishment was complete, with his caste broken, ‘an outcast, deprived of all social and civil rights’.37
Most British soldiers disapproved of flogging. Private Robert Waterfield maintained that:
In India the men of the Army generally is looked upon as so many pieces of one great machine that is passive in the hands of the engineer; and as to sense or feeling, that is not thought of. The private soldier is looked upon as the lowest class of animals, and only fit to be ruled with the cat o’nine tails and the provost sergeant. Such a course is not likely either to improve or to correct their morals, and I am sorry to say that it is very bad.38
Officers often put the argument in reverse, arguing that the army should retain flogging precisely because of the sort of raw material it was composed of. Lieutenant Gordon-Alexander of the 93rd remembered how:
A man in my Company had been tried by regimental court-martial, and, very properly, sentenced to receive 50 lashes for assaulting a non-commissioned officer. He was a particularly smart, clean and brave soldier, but was of an insubordinate disposition, and when he took too much to drink developed a murderously violent temper. He had been arrested, by the orders of the sergeant of the guard, when coming into the barrack gate, for being drunk; but before he could be over-powered he succeeded in crowning the sergeant with a large tub of slops, and was very violent.
After his punishment the man declared: ‘Dae ye ca’ that a flogging? Hoots! I’ve got many a warse licking frae ma mither!’ Gordon-Alexander discerned none of that ‘feeling of “degradation” which according to the sentimentalists … overwhelms not only the man who is flogged but also his comrades as being liable to the same punishment’.39
John Shipp, twice a soldier and twice an officer, saw flogging from both sides. When he was regimental sergeant major of the 24th Light Dragoons, in his second enlistment, he had a long talk to a soldier who:
was never off my gaol book … ‘Sergeant-Major, I have never done any good since your predecessor got me flogged. I have tried all I can to forget it, but I cannot. It crushes me to the ground. That day’s work has ruined me. I am of a good family, but I never will go back to disgrace them with the scars on my back!’ He died about three months afterwards, in a sad state of drunkenness.40
George Loy Smith’s regiment was not overjoyed to receive Lord Brudenell, the future Earl of Cardigan, as its commanding officer even before:
a circumstance occurred for which I could not quite forgive Lord Brudenell. An old man, John Dowling, who had completed his service and was going home to be discharged, was confined a few days for being drunk on picquet (at other times for this offence, he would have been awarded about eight days congee house). Lord Brudenell ordered him to be tried by court martial. A general parade was ordered and we marched to the Riding School. When the court martial was read, to our amazement he was awarded corporal punishment. No one present supposed for a moment that Lord Brudenell could be hard-hearted enough to carry it out, particularly when the old man turned round to him and, in an imploring tone, said ‘My Lord, I hope you won’t flog me. I am an old man just going home to my friends, and I should be sorry for such a disgrace to come on me now.’
‘Tie him up,’ said Lord Brudenell. The farriers then commenced their brutal work. My heart heaved and I had great difficulty from bursting into a flood of tears. After the parade, loud were the denunciations against him, all – both officers and men – feeling the change that had come over us.41
Flogging was administered in India to the very end of its legal existence. In Afghanistan in 1879 Charles MacGregor noted that: ‘Our men gutted a village tonight, against orders, so the provost-marshal flogged no less than 150 of them.’42 On 16 January 1880, the Reverend J. G. Gregson, a Baptist clergyman, was at Jelalabad:
Before breakfast I saw a regiment parade to witness some of their men flogged for breaking into the canteen and stealing the rum. Nothing could be more disgraceful than this drunken crime, which was lodged, not against one man, but against the whole guard. After this a sepoy guard had to take over the duty of British soldiers. When shall we see this evil abolished – this rum ration? It brings evil and shame wherever it is tolerated; it brings disease and disgrace into every camp where it is issued.43
But drink did more than promote crime. There was a good deal of truth in Henry Havelock’s assertion that a unit’s effective strength was always reduced by the fact that its hospital was full of drunkards. Havelock’s regiment, HM’
s 13th Light Infantry, was the first in the army to form a temperance association, in 1836. An anonymous NCO of the HM’s 26th Foot, writing the year before, when the regiment lost twenty-four men from hepatitis, wrote:
The causes of death … and continued progress of heptatic disease prove the injurious effects of the use of ardent spirits. One third of the deaths are directly attributable to excess … Tho’ every means are employed to make the men sensible of their true interests the general prejudice which prevails in favour of the use of spirits renders them averse to relinquish it, and thus is maintained the continued and prolific source of drunkenness and crime.44
Two years later the same soldier attributed a ‘more favourable state of health’ to the fact that there was now a temperance society in the regiment. A staff sergeant in the 13th Light Infantry wrote that Lieutenant Colonel Dennie had warned the battalion that
of nearly one hundred men who have perished in the last year the remote, if not the immediate, cause of their disease and death … has been liquor. If anything can convince even Irishmen that liquor is killing them, let them only observe and remark the health and efficiency of the native regiments in the garrison.45
The 13th did indeed have a very strong Irish contingent: Loy Smith thought them ‘wild and ferocious … we being English and very young, were positively afraid of them for … they threatened to murder all the English in camp’.46
This close association between drink, crime and disease encouraged growing official support for regimental temperance societies, and the recognition that, while regimental canteens were the source of much of the trouble, soldiers had nowhere else to go in their leisure hours. General Sir James Outram, president of the East India Company’s council, and one of the best-loved generals of the age, begged:
Give them in our canteens shade and coolness (by punkahs and tatties where necessary) in the daytime, abundant illumination in the evening, light unadulterated beer to any extent they choose to pay for … and just in proportion as we carry out the recommendations I have made in this … missive, and supplement these recommended measures by compelling our canteen-keepers to furnish fresh, strong, delicious coffee, genuine and well-made tea, and good and cheep ginger beer, lemonade and soda-water … just in the same proportion shall we win our soldiers from the love of alcohol.47
Outram Institutes were established in several garrisons and cantonments from 1861, but it became clear that the idea worked best when such institutes were regimental and wholly alcohol-free. The Soldiers’ Total Temperance Association was formed in 1862, under the supervision of the Reverend J. G. Gregson. There were twenty-nine regimental branches with 1,125 members in 1866; fifty-three with 4,342 in 1872; and 110 with over 10,000 members in 1887. The association amalgamated with two others in 1888, and in 1896 the Army Temperance Association, part-funded by the government and the subscriptions of its members, had 22,810 members in India. It declined steadily thereafter, but, if it had not solved the problem of drunkenness in the army, it did help reduce the incidence of what Lieutenant George Barrow called the army’s ‘besetting sin’.
Most soldiers felt, despite much evidence to the contrary, that they could handle drink. They were less inclined to experiment with opium, which was widely available in India, and was so widely used by sepoys that during the First World War it was shipped to the Indian Corps in France under the cover name ‘Indian treacle’. John Shipp believed that overuse of the drug among native populations gave British troops a great advantage. ‘I would recommend all officers who serve in India always to attack the enemy at night, if it is at all possible,’ he wrote. ‘For they eat and smoke such a quantity of opium that their sleep is a profound stupor … Often there is not a single sentinel on watch.’48 A seaman held prisoner by Hyder Ali was given some opium to prepare for his forcible circumcision, and admitted that: ‘In the course of two years, we were in the habit of smoking it freely, to drown our troubles, and we well knew its effects.’49
However, it could provide a much-needed breathing space, as William Forbes-Mitchell, then a corporal, exhausted by the fast march from Lucknow to Cawnpore, remembered:
I shall never forget the misery of that march! … having covered thirty-seven miles under thirty hours, my condition can better be imagined than described. After I became cold, I grew so still that I positively could not use my legs. Now Captain Dawson had a native servant named Hyder Khan, who had been an officer’s servant all his life, and had been through many campaigns. I had made a friend of old Hyder, and when he saw me in my tired state, he said in his camp English: ‘Corporal sahib, you look God-damned tired; don’t drink grog. Old Hyder give you something damn much better than grog for tired man.’
With that he went away, but shortly afterwards returned, and gave me a small pill, which he told me was opium, and about half a pint of hot tea, which he had prepared for himself and his master. I swallowed the pill and drank the tea, and in less than ten minutes I felt myself so much refreshed as to be able to get up and draw the grog for the men of the company and to serve it out … I then lay down … and had a sound refreshing sleep till next morning, and then got so much restored that, except for the sores on my feet from broken blisters, I could have undertaken another forty-mile march. I always recall this experience when I read many of the ignorant arguments of the Anti-Opium Society, who would, if they had the power, compel the Government to deprive every hard-worked coolie of the only solace in his life of toil.50
BIBIS AND MEMSAHIBS
IF DRINK WAS ONE major preoccupation for officers and men in British India, women were certainly another. Here the picture is rich and complex, for attitudes to sexual relationships were not simply the result of changing views in Britain, but had a profound effect on cultural interchange in India itself. Although there were many monkish warriors who mortified the flesh with long rides or cold baths, the majority of British officers and men in India found sexual abstinence an unreasonable challenge. A growing minority married European women; some, notably officers and a minority of NCOs whose circumstances permitted it, took bibis, or Indian mistresses (although, as we shall soon see, the term often meant a good deal more than this); others sought solace with prostitutes, who themselves varied from beautiful, accomplished (and costly) nautch-girls to worn, hard-working (and economical) women in regimental brothels. Attitudes changed as the period went on, and the arrival of growing numbers of European women, linked with other factors such as the rise of muscular Christianity and the increasing efforts of missionaries, helped widen that thread of cultural apartheid that, broad or narrow, was always woven into British India.
The Georgians could be extraordinarily relaxed about sexual matters. In 1783 William Hickey, who had just spent upwards of 12,000 rupees on furnishing his new property in Calcutta, set up house with his companion Charlotte:
Upon thus settling in town it became necessary for her to go through a disagreeable and foolish ceremony, in those time always practiced by newcomers of the fair sex, and which was called ‘setting-up’, that is the mistress of the house being stuck up, fully dressed, in a chair at the head of the best room, (the apartment brilliantly lighted), having a female friend placed on each side, thus to receive the ladies of the settlement, three gentlemen being selected for the purpose of introducing the respective visitors, male and female, for every lady that called was attended by at least two gentlemen … A further inconvenience attended this practice, which was the necessity of returning every one of the visits thus made.51
However, the fact that Hickey and the beautiful Charlotte were not actually married did not much matter. Nor was Hickey’s reputation ruined when, after Charlotte’s untimely death at the age of twenty-one, he installed the ‘plump and delightful’ Jemdanee as his bibi in 1790, writing how he:
had often admired a lovely Hindostanee girl who sometimes visited Carter [a house guest of Hickey’s] at my home, who was very lively and clever. Upon Carter’s leaving Bengal I invited her to become an inmate with me,
and from that time to the day of her death Jemdanee, which was her name, lived with me, respected and admired by all my friends by her extraordinary sprightliness and good humour. Unlike the women in general in Asia she never secluded herself from the sight of strangers; on the contrary, she delighted in joining my male parties, cordially joining in the mirth which prevailed, though she never touched wine or spirits of any kind.52
In 1796 she happily told him ‘that she was in a family way, expressing her earnest desire that it might prove “a chuta William Saheb”’. She died in childbirth, and Hickey, rake that he was, bitterly regretted the loss of ‘as gentle and affectionately attached a girl as ever man was blessed with’. The following year their little William ‘suddenly became seriously indisposed’ and, ‘notwithstanding the professional abilities and indefatigable exertions of Dr Hare … ’, died after ten days’ illness, ‘and thus was I deprived of the only living memento of my lamented favourite Jemdanee’.53
A chronicler described Edith Swan-neck, the consort of King Harold, killed at Hastings in 1066, as his ‘wife in the Danish manner’; bibis were wives in the Indian manner, and the word subsumes a shade of meaning from mistress to wife. There was no civil marriage in India, and it was impossible for Christian men to marry non-Christian women in church: many bibis were, however, married to British husbands according to Hindu or Moslem rites. Their union was regarded as wholly legitimate by their families, and they supported their husbands with a courage and dignity which deserves to be remembered.
Captain Hamish McPherson, for instance, was killed in action commanding his Bahawalpur troops while helping Herbert Edwardes against Mulraj at the battle of Sadusam. McPherson’s men were ‘tolerably well equipped’, observed a Company’s officer, ‘having a band and colours’. McPherson’s Moslem wife had him buried in a splendid tomb, with an inscription that a proud Scotsman would have appreciated: