A Company and its Loot

Four soldiers in four different uniforms. Look closely and you may find that it is the same soldier, standing ramrod erect, is serving as a model for different sets of coats, caps and trousers. In all probability he was from a village in present day Tamil Nadu, Telengana or Kerala, who was drilled and trained in Madras, and sent to fight battles at Plassey, Buxar, Pathargarh or Assey.

What did he do with all the money he earned from the British East India Company (EIC)? What stories did he tell his grandchildren of his long marches and battles across north India? Of cavalry charges blown to smithereens, of cities raped and plundered for his EIC officers? We may never get to know stories of the men who actually transformed India but William Dalrymple's latest book will certainly change the way you've understood Indian history from school textbooks and Amar Chitra Kathas.

The Anarchy is about the "Relentless Rise of the East India Company". It is also about bursting myths  and stereotypes; looking at the larger picture on the chessboard of Indian political economy, and reminding ourselves about the price we paid for our insular stupidity and internecine conflicts for  about two centuries.

The numbers are staggering. In 1500s India had a population of just 150 million (less than that of just Uttar Pradesh today!) - a fifth of the world's total -- and it was an industrial powerhouse, a world leader in manufactured textiles. In the early 1600s India was creating 22.5% of world GDP. England then had just 5% of India's population and was producing just under 3% of world's manufactured goods. Between 1586 and 1605, European silver flowed into the Mughal heartland at the rate of 18 metric tons a year!

And then wealth - gold, silver, youth, talent - started flowing in the opposite direction, gradually increasing pace over a century until the whole county had been reduced to a basket-case by 1947.

We may never get to know about the life and times of the farmers, weavers and foot-soldiers on whose backs the British looted India, but life of the 16th Mughal emperor, Shah Alam II gives us an idea of the chaos and turmoil that transformed the country into a basket case -

"He was now in his seventy-seventh year. As a boy he had seen Nader Shah ride into Delhi, and leave carrying away the Peacock Throne, into which was embedded the great Koh-i-Noor diamond. He had escaped Imad-ul-Mulk's attempt to assassinate him and survived repeated battles with Clive. He had fought the Company at Patna and Buxar, awarded the Diwani to Robert Clive at Allahabad and defied the Company with his cross-country trek back to Delhi. There, with Mirza Najaf Khan, against all the odds he had nearly succeeded in rebuilding the empire of this ancestors; only to see it vanish like a mirage after the premature death of the last great Mughal general. Finally, at his lowest point, the Emperor had been assaulted and blinded by his psychotic former favourite, Ghulam Qadir (Rohilla)."

While this book takes us through the changing fortunes of individuals and nations, I found a few things really remarkable -

* Maratha Resilience: The fighting units created by Shivaji perhaps stood the best chance of taking over the mantle of the Mughals - especially after having quickly dominated much of North and East India. Despite the terrible defeat at the Third Battle of Panipat (~36,000 dead in one day!) they bounced back to defeat the Jats, Rajputs and Rohillas, and yet , when it really mattered, the Peshwas, Holkars and Scindia's kept squabbling amongst themselves and failed to unite against a common enemy.

* Forts and Battles: Many of the key battles were won by a whisker - especially the historic ones at Plassey and Buxar. But there were many others that barely find mention in our history books, especially -

• The Battle of Udhwa Nala (1763) where Mir Qasim tried to take a stand against EIC, and the capture of a PoW from a raiding party led to a surprise counter-attack...and the slaughter of over 15,000 defenders.
• The Battle of Pathargarh (1772): 10 years after the Rohillas ditched the Marathas and sided with the Afghan invader, Admed Shah Abdali at the Third Battle of Panipat, the Marathas took their revenge at the Pathargarh Fort. Its amazing to know that among the captives at this fort were Maratha women captured a decade later at Panipat!
• Battle of Talegaon (1779) - EICs first major defeat against the Marathas which led to the humiliating Treaty of Wadgaon.
• Seige of Aligarh (1803) - EIC against Marathas and Rajputs who had been sold out by their own mercenary French commanders.
• Battle of Assaye (1803) - The last of the great decisive battles between the Marathas and the EIC

* Naga Ascetic Warriors: It is surprising to know that more than 6000 naked Naga ascetics fought for the Nawab of Avadh as shock troopers!

* Mercenaries: There were scores of French mercenaries who helped modernise rival armies in India, from Tipu's Mysore to Madhaji Scindia's Marathas, but the most ruthless of them all was perhaps the Germany mercenary, Walter Reinhardt Sombre, the general who deftly shifted loyalties to the highest bidders. His widow, Begum Sumru, too carried on the game of switching loyalties from Mir Qasim to Shah Alam, from Marathas to the British.

* Moneylenders: If it were not for the Marwari moneylenders, and their networks, led by the Jagat Seths the Company simply would not have been in a position to afford the wars. With each small victory in the battlefield and the display of European armament technology and discipline, the Seths abandoned the local kings for the foreign merchants who had a better repayment record.

Ultimately its money that did the talking!

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REFERENCES & LINKS

* ToI (2011) on Pathargarh Fort - https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/blogs/HiddenHeritage/when-monuments-go-missing/

* Shejwalkar, TJ (1946): PANIPAT, 1761 - http://library.bjp.org/jspui/bitstream/123456789/2488/1/Panipat-1761.pdf

* Najib Ud-Daula - The Rohilla chieftan who allied with Ahmed Shah Abdali to defeat the Marathas at Panipat (1761) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Najib_ad-Dawlah

Velu Pillai's Mesopotamia

Me-so-po-ta-mia. A country that almost sounded like the notes of a song. It had a certain ring to it.

As a schoolboy from Hyderabad visiting his grandparents in Kerala during the summer holidays, one got to hear about a number of countries. Across the paddy fields there lived a grand-aunt who had spent much of her life in Malaysia. Many in the neighbourhood were working in the Gulf states - Saudi, Dubai, or Oman. Our chavadi - the airiest hall in the ancestral home -  had large almirah's stuffed with musty, moth-eaten National Geographic's and Readers Digest's from USA, and old textbooks published in Great Britain.

In the western room (Kizhakke-muri) an old, sepia tinted photo adorned one of the walls. It was of a bespectacled man in uniform with a medal pinned to his chest. "That is your valiya-appoopan (great-grandfather)", I was told, "He served the British Indian Army in Mesopotamia during the first World War".

Mesopotamia. In my imagination a country with such a name had to be a grand place. Yet there were no books from Mesopotamia. The country no longer existed in the school atlas either - it was now called Iraq.

I learnt later that the man in the sepia print was my grandmother's father, Velu Pillai. Details of his life were sketchy. He had served in the Army Postal Corps. My grandmother was four years old when her parents left her with relatives in Kerala and went to Mesopotamia. They had returned to India in 1927 with an infant who was born in Baghdad. This little boy would grow up to fight the next World War, serve in the swampy airfields of Burma and retire as a Wing Commander in independent India.

I had always wondered about the life and times of Velu Pillai. How did he travel with his young wife, Karthiyayani Amma across the Arabian Sea to that ancient land between two great rivers? What did he think of the people from other foreign lands to fight somebody else's war. Did he see himself as a cat's paw?

Last week I came across a book that gave me a glimpse of India's role in the First World War: George Morton-Jack's "THE INDIAN EMPIRE AT WAR - from Jihad to Victory - the Untold Story of the Indian Army in the First World War".

The big picture turned out to be quite dismal. Countless Indians had suffered for the white man's greed, his squabble for colonies across the world. 1.5 million Indian servicemen had served in the war - a number equivalent of the empire's military forces from Australia, New Zealand, the Pacific Islands, South Africa, the Caribbean, Canada, Hong Kong and Singapore put together -- a sixth of all the empire's servicemen. No less than 34,000 of them died in some of the most brutal battles of the western front, Gallipoli, East Africa, Iraq and Palestine.

Velu Pillai would have been a part of the Indian Expeditionary Force D which faced the Ottomans in Mesopotamia. They had seized Basra in Nov-1914 and started pushing up the Euphrates and Tigris where they had  repulsed attack by 7000 Turks in Apr-1915 leaving 3000 of them dead in Shu'ayba, some 15 miles west of Basra.

Then the tables had turned. Pushed hard by an ambitious, and stingy, governor-general of India who wanted to retire as the 'Pasha of Baghdad', Force D found itself short of food and ammunition at Kut, by the banks of the Tigris. The besieged 6th Indian Division at Kut dug 30 miles of trenches, suffered 2200 casualties in keeping the Turks out, until they surrendered on 29 April 1916.

Whatever remained of Force D's 6th Division - 10,500 Indian and 2600 British prisoners-of-war - were then sent on a 600-mile death march from Kut through the Iraqi desert, to labour camps in Ottoman Syria outside Aleppo and in the nearby Amanus and Taurus mountain ranges. Only a few had survived the ordeal.

Revenge and retribution came a year later. From mid-December 1916 to March 1917, a completely revamped Force D was let loose by London to avenge the fall of Kut and to steamroll the Turkish Army for 200 miles up the Tigris to Baghdad. Another year of fighting in Europe and the war was over, on terms that were so humiliating for the vanquished that it took another horrific war 26 years later before things settled down.

What happened to the million Indians who returned home after the war? What we do know for certain is that the British continued to play one ethnic group against another most of whom remained loyal foot-soldiers for the British colonial apparatus:

• In 1919, men of the 54th Sikh, 59th Scinde Rifles and 9th Gurkhas carried out the massacre at Amritsar's Jallianwala Bagh on 13 April. 1650 bullets were fired in 10 minutes to kill some 500 Punjabis and wound 1200 more...some of the casualties were their own colleagues - Indian Army veterans, Sikhs and Hindu Jats who had themselves served the British Indian Army in France and Iraq.
• India's Commander-in-Chief Charles Monro massed 340,000 men on the Indo-Afghan border for the Third Afghan War, initiated as a jihad by the new Emir Amanullah following the assassination of this father Habibullah, and ending in his swift defeat.
• In 1921-22 seven Indian battalions with artillery and armoured cars 'suppressed' the rural Moplah Rebellion by Muslim villagers armed with swords; they killed 2400 Moplahs and wounded 1650.

What did Velu Pillai think of all this? How did his experiences change him after he returned home, to serve the maharaja of Travancore as a Dy.Tehsildar? Unfortunately none of his notes or letters survived in the damp and humidity of the chavadi with fungus and termites for company.

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REFERENCES & LINKS

* The book - https://www.amazon.in/Indian-Empire-At-War-Victory/dp/1408707705

* Kipling's poem "Mesopotamia" - https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57430/mesopotamia-56d23af3008a7

* Word War I Records - https://livesofthefirstworldwar.org/

* Etymology - Mesopotamia - "Land between rivers" - aka Do-ab!

When History Repeats Itself

Each time I read a book by William Dalrymple, I wonder why our country does not produce such engaging scholar-storytellers. The book, "Return of a King" is no exception. It is meticulously researched and weaves a story that blends the contrasting versions of the victorious and the vanquished, into one 500-page, eminently readable tome.

In this book, the author also has is also a personal angle tucked away in the story. Dalrymple's great-great-grand uncle was an active participant in the Afghan wars, first as a bureaucrat in Punjab, and then as a soldier and prisoner-of-war in Afghanistan. So it also serves, to some extent, as the family history of a Scottish Highlander.

The book describes a period is spread across three centuries, from the time of Nadir Shah's invasion and plunder of Delhi in 1739 to the entry of British and US forces in the 1980s,  with the proclaimed intent of "fighting terror" and "restoring democracy" in what had become the stronghold of Osama bin Laden and his band of Arab fighters.

At the time of Nadir Shah, it was his Shiite Persian followers - the Qizilbash - along with his former soldiers, who formed the ruling elite of Afghanistan. The Sadozai clan was formed by a soldier named Ahmad Shah Abdali/Durrani who was to defeat the Maratha forces in the Third Battle of Panipat in 1761, while the Barakzai clan arose from a gunner is Nadir's army named, Haji Jamal Khan.

While the central theme is politics, intrigue and power-struggles between these two clans, the book makes you wonder about the Afghanistan that would have existed long before it was taken over by Islamic soldiers of fortune, and of the times when fighting "Jihad" against "Infidels" was not the rousing war-cry that destroyed a rich cultural heritage.

It offers glimpses of economic linkages cultural traditions that persisted even until the last century -- of Shikarpuri merchants whom kings approached to fund their war-efforts; of Nepali pilgrims visiting the remains of Hindu holy sites in the mountains; of regular raids that took place across the Khyber Pass into the plains; slave traders who flourished in the markets of Kabul, Khulm and Balkh, all the way to Bukhara.

You wonder what a different world it would have been a few thousand years ago, when Princess Gandhari of Mahabharata moved out of Khandahar to marry a king in the Gangetic plains, and then went on to blindfold herself and listen to a courtier's commentary of the internecine war that destroyed her dynasty.

Later, did Alexander's army too wreak vengeance on villages just as the British army did in the early 1840s? Did they also plunder and rape, torch villages and cut down all fruiting trees, just as the British did in the Jalalabad valley and in villages like Istalif, the Shomali plains (which is today home to the USAF base at Baghram)?

What thoughts would have crossed the minds of the thousands of people who were taken away as slaves - so many that an entire mountain range is now called the Hindukush ("Hindu Killer") where most perished? In this context, some of the narratives make you cringe, such as the one by Josiah Harlan that describes how Uzbek slave-traders sewed their captives to their horse-saddles:

"To oblige the prisoner to keep up, a strand of coarse horse-hair is passed by means of a crooked needle, under around the collar-bone. a few inches from its junction with the sternum; with the hair a loop is formed which they attach a rope that may be fastened to the saddle. The captive is constrained to keep near the retreating horse-man, with his hands tied behind his person, is altogether helpless" 

This story revolves around the return of a king, and yet, it reads like a play that has been performed many times over on the same stage. The costumes change, religious leanings change from Hindu and Buddhist to Islam; languages switch from maybe Kharoshti/Prakrit, Pali, and Sanskrit to Persian, Pashto, Dari and English, but the same tragedy gets repeated over and over again.

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LINKS & REFERENCES

* GoodReads - "Return of a King" - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13454654-return-of-a-king
* Istalif village - http://www.istalif.com/

Travelers to Tibet

The Great Himalayan Range has always been a formidable barrier that limited India's interaction with Tibet and China.

Unlike the North West frontier, it has not been a thoroughfare for invading armies. Instead, it has always been the doughty traders, monks and herdsmen who connected the tribes living in the Tibetan plateau to those on the vast, fertile plains of India. The rivers that cut through the plains have always always been important for us, but did we really care where exactly they originated from?

Among the 20 longest rivers in the world, five flow though in Asia. Three of these have unique names: Yang Tse (no.3, 6300km), Huang He (Yellow River, no. 6, 6464km), Mekong (no.12, 4350km). The remaining two are hyphenated because they by one name in one country, and another name as it flows into a distinctly different region - the Brahmaputra–Tsangpo (no.12, 3848km), and Indus–Sênggê Zangbo (no. 19, 3610km).

Charles Allen's book, "A Mountain in Tibet" tells the fascinating story of how these hyphenations came to be. It is about a few officers and agents of the British East India Company who are obsessed by shikaar (hunting), the desire to escape boring desk-jobs, and by the lure of the Great Unknowns. These young men (most, less than 27) venture into the mountains, hoping to accurately map new places, and opening new trade routes into Asia.



People and places come alive in Allen's narratives. It starts from the earliest expeditions by Moorcroft and Hearsey, the Schlagintweits, and then, to the undercover, spying expeditions undertaken by the Bhotia pundits from Milam village in the Kumaon mountains - Nain Singh Rawat, and his clansmen. It takes you through remote mountain villages and passes (Mana, Niti, Dakeo), across the the sacred lakes of Rakas Tal and Mansarovar, to Mt. Kailas and beyond.

One common thread that runs through Allen's narratives is that if it were not for the European - mainly British -  adventurers, armed with sextants, compasses- and musical snuff-boxes -  the world would not have known anything about the Tibet, or about the real origins of the great rivers that sustain life in South Asia.

Is this really true?

Some of the oldest surviving Sanskrit texts from India are being discovered in ancient Tibetan monastries. "Mulamadhyamakakarika", a 2nd century founding texts of Mahayana Buddhism, was found in Drepung Monastry. The Lankavatara Sutra was found in the Potala Palace in Lhasa. The Bhadrakalpika Sutra, dating back to the 4th century was found in Xinjiang. An Indian monk, Bodhidharma (5-6 century CE), is recorded as being one who popularized Buddhism in China, and then on, to Japan.

Obviously, a lot of people have been going to and fro, long before the first Europeans set foot on the Himalayas. And yet, Allen would like us to believe that until his heroes stepped in, Tibet was 'unknown to the world'.

Today, in the age of Google Earth and satellite pictures, this is common knowledge that can be verified by anybody sitting in front of a laptop screen. Yet, it is intriguing to know that despite a history spanning at least 4000 years, the origin of these rivers was not common knowledge.  People living in the Indus or Bramhapurta valley may not have known that their river originated in the barren Tibetan plateau, thousands of kilometers away. Then again, in the vast web of Himalayan rivulets and streams that feed a river, is it a significant discovery to claim a single-point source?

"A Mountain in Tibet" is a really interesting book. It is also another reminder that we continue to look at ourselves through the purple blinkers worn by the Europeans, and that this will continue until we start producing great non-fiction writers who tell our side of the story.

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LINKS

• Krishnan, Ananth (2017): The Lost Sanskrit Treasures of Tibet, India Today, 1 June 2017
• List of rivers by length - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_rivers_by_length

Tipu

How does one view a South Indian monarch who stood up to the British? Is he really worthy of all the negative press he has been getting from the newly empowered echo-boxes of the right wing, especially over Twitter and Facebook? These are some the questions that crossed my mind while picking up Kate Brittlebank's book, "Tiger - The Life of Tipu Sultan".

As a Keralan, I have always had a dim view of this father-son duo who invaded Malabar and Kochi, and along the way, slaughtered, enslaved or forcibly converted the locals, apart from the legacy of one of the most odd place-names in the region - Sultan Bathery (Sultan's Battery). It also brought back memories of an odd sight I had seen in the dense forests of Talavadi, in the Western Ghats. A long line of huge Banyan trees marked the remnants of a highway built across the mountains, by Mysorean army to reach the port cities of Kerala. 

The book is a quick, easy read. Right at the outset, it sets the tone to readers' expectations by stating clearly that the focus is on the Tipu the person - a son, a father and a leader - rather than weighty matters related to state policy, military strategy and ethics. 

This works pretty well. For one thing, it confirms that Tipu Sultan's identity as a Muslim was hardly an issue within his own kingdom of Mysore. He lavished funds and patronage to the shrines of all religions - Hindu, Muslim and Jain - located in his territories. His own palace in Srirangapattana stood next to a Vishnu temple dedicated to Sri Ranganatha, and he referred to the head of the monastery at Sringeri Math as "Jagatguru".

Outside his realm, he played the usual policy of Divide and Rule. He allied with the Marathas of Pune and the Nizam of Hyderabad whenever it was convenient. At other times, he actively encouraged infighting within their territories. Tipu instructed his agents in Pune to trigger fights between Hindus and Muslims, to weaken the Marathas - "Let the fire of discord, therefore, be kindled amongst them, to the end that they may, in this manner, waste each other".

There is good reason for his enemies to hate him -- especially after what he did to the Nairs of Malabar, the Coorgis of Kodagu, and the Christians of Konkan. Yet, as the author notes, "Warfare at this time was brutal, and the punishment for those who resisted often cruel. It was common practice to set examples to forestall further opposition". It is certainly not different from military intimidation described today as "shock and awe".

In the end, Tipu does manage to come through as a fairly good ruler, until he put all his eggs in the French basket, and then, ran out of luck. 

An Era of Darkness

A book launch was held yesterday at the former residence of the Commander-in-Chief of British India, now called Teen Murti Bhavan. At an estate that placed symbolically behind the imposing Viceregal Lodge, two Indians sat on the stage to launch a book, and to demolish the notion that 200 years British rule was "good" for India.

The venue at Teen Murti Bhavan - NMML auditorium - was packed. Folks who lingered outside to tuck in a few more chai-pakora's had to stand by the doorway as the author, Shashi Tharoor and historian R. Mukherjee too the stage to discuss the book, "An Era of Darkness - The British Empire in India".

The discussion took on a predictable course with Tharoor outlining the reasons why he thought a such book was necessary; the realization that most of his countrymen were blissfully unaware of the methods used by the British to systematically reduce the country from an global economic heavyweight to a basket-case, and of contemporary notions of nationalism.

One point that stuck in my mind came up in the Q&A session. An elderly person sitting on the front row asked, "Throughout history, why is it that we were betrayed by our own people?"

Tharoor skirted this question, and restricted his answer to the usual suspects - the Mir Kasim's and Mir Jaffer's - of the British Era. In introduction to his book he tosses the ball back to the other court by saying, "...when a marauder destroys your home and takes away your cash and jewelry, his responsibility for his actions far exceeds that of the servant who opened the door for him, whether hout of fear, cupidity or because he simply didn't know any better".

It is difficult to imagine that the grand quislings in our history were acting out of fear, cupidity or ignorance. The Mir's of Bengal seemed to be driven primarily by ambition, greed and self-interest. Ditto for Jaichand, the king of Kannauj, who allied with Mohammad of Ghor, to settle a personal insult, or political score with the Chauhan ruler of Delhi.

Clearly, there is something more basic at work in our minds. In a country that has always been a slow-cooking melting pot of different races, languages and habits, almost every ruler would have sought out existing fissures, divisions and rivalries to consolidate their own power-base. It is a trend that continues to this day.

Greed and self-interest was also apparent in the manner in which the audience jostled around Tharoor, doggedly ignoring all pleas to come in an orderly line. A singular lack of concern for others that was also being played out at the traffic roundabout outside where vehicles refused to give way, and slowing themselves in the process; along the footpaths where bikes and scooters rushed into a space that belonged to pedestrians, and, finally in the metro trains where perfectly healthy men squatted on the train floor, while others struggled to find space to stand upright.

Clearly, the era of darkness is yet to disappear into our history books.

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LINKS

* BL review - http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/opinion/books/uday-balakrishnan-reviews-an-era-of-darkness-by-shashi-tharoor/article9391768.ece

* IE review - http://indianexpress.com/article/lifestyle/books/shashi-tharoor-book-an-era-of-darkness-british-colonialism-in-india-3741446/