25 JUNE 1977, Page 25

Eye for eye

Benny Green

The Siege of Delhi Alexander Llewellyn (Macdonald and Jane's £5.95)

Things were never the same after the Mutiny, and perhaps they were never the same before it. In the old freebooting days, before the conquest of India was formalised into viceregal flummery, the Georgian adventurers who went out to administer the old Mogul empire did so with a degree of urbanity which expressed itself in a liveand-let-live attitude regarding culture, religion and social habits. But once the Victorian determination to be good made itself felt in the East, all that was finished. The change is summarised quite beautifully by the alterations to the menus of the Raj. At Surat in the seventeenth century the men of John Company sat down to a Sunday dinner of deer, antelope and peacock; by Curzon's time their descendants were sipping the mulligatawny and nibbling at the dishes of marzipan and chocolate fudge.

The evolution from the carnivorous to the confectionery had its cultural equivalent in the provincialism of a man like Macaulay, who, with the very best intentions, decided that the only hope for India was to impose upon it those same codes of conduct which had transformed his own land into the legendary arcadia of faith, hope and charity for which it was revered. The goddess Kali in corsets. The Macaulayesque policy was inevitable, and so was the reaction to it. Llewellyn in his compact, coherent book does well to make the point that there was no grand strategy of revolt in India; things just happened which expressed the mutual alienation of conqueror and conquered. The Mutiny was the incident which dramatised the process; it was not the process itself. And once blood was spilled, there was no way back to an earlier tacit understanding. Perhaps the English might have tempered their imperial severity with a little more compassion, except that had they done so they would have seen themselves as • blasphemers, so many Public School sepoys made to bite on the greased cartridge of an abhorrent heresy. Colonel Wheeler of the Bengal army, proselytising in the villages and bazaars, told the glazed locals that he was 'acting in the capacity of a Christian soldier under the authority of my heavenly superior'. John Nicholson, the towering genius of Llewellyn's narrative, was famous for his addiction to holy writ, and so were many who served with him. For such men to have winked at the barbarities of rival cults was unthinkable, which is no doubt why they failed to perceive the barbarities of their own. Fearless men like Colonel Sleeman, who campaigned so selflessly against the Thuggee stranglers, saw no mirrorimages when Nicholson 'would hang mutineers by the score and then retire to his tent to weep'.

But the modern reader must strive to avoid the cardinal sin of the modern reader through the ages, which is to judge the actions of one epoch by the morality of another. If we deride flat-earthers like Wheler, then we had better prepare ourselves for the derision of posterity, because we are all flat-earthers in one regard or another. What is so extraordinary about men like Wheeler is not their assurance that God was a British staff officer, but what rotten Christians they were. Bishops and cardinals bayed for infidel blood, until Victoria herself confessed to disquiet 'at the un-Christian spirit shown by the public towards India in general'. One wonders what Her Majesty would have made of the astonishing Nicholson, who was intelligent and compassionate and yet: On one occasion officers in a mess-tent were commenting irritably that dinner was half an hour late. Nicholson came in and laconically apologised to them. "I am sorry for the delay, gentlemen. I have just hanged the cooks".'

The explanation is perfectly logical, and was best expressed by Hesketh Pearson in his excellent biography of Nicholson, The Hero of Delhi, where he reminds us that for many devout soldiers Christianity meant not the cheek-turning operation of the New Testament, but the smite-or-be-smitten ultimatum of the Old. The unfortunate cooks who spoiled the broth of those complaining English officers were receiving a post-graduate course in the implications of that quaint old motto, an eye for an eye. So much has been written lately about the British in India in the last century, especially by Michael Edwardes and Philip Mason, that I cannot help wondering if there is any urgent need for Llewellyn's neat offering. And even the best historians have been getting the stiffest opposition from tellers of tales. Perhaps the best way of following the affairs at Delhi and Cawnpore and Lucknow is to read John Masters's The Nightrunners of Bengal or J. G. Farrell's wonderful The Siege of Krishnapur. After all, the cold facts have a smack of moonshine about them — that senile voluptuary the King of Delhi thinking he could transmute himself Into a house-fly; the British at Arrah making a fortress out of a billiard room; the nights of returning to the old homestead in the civil lines to find the servants gone and the sky tinted with the fires of bungalows burning apparently of their own volition. It sounds more like something out of Frances Hodgson Burnett than a chapter of imperial history, and yet on the impeccable testimony of scholars like Llewellyn, that is the way it was. The most pathetic fact in his book, and the most Victorian, is that after his death from wounds Nicholson received the ultimate accolade: a street was named after him off the Blackfriars Road.