Daring and dying in the service of the Raj
Anne Chisholm
SOLDIER SAHIBS by Charles Allen John Murray, £22.50, pp. 368 It is curious how the very phrase 'North- West Frontier' has retained the power to thrill, even in these post-imperial times. As Charles Allen says, that particular frontier, which ran for 1,000 miles between what is now Pakistan and Afghanistan, 'was to Britain and British India what the Wild West was to the United States of America': a place in the mind as much as a place on the map. However, when about 30 years ago the Indian empire stopped being gen- erally regarded as something vaguely embarrassing, connected with oppression, moustachioed bores, elephant-foot umbrel- la stands, and photographs of Granny being carried in a doolie, and became fash- ionable as a theme for books and films, it was not the Frontier that aroused affection and nostalgia but the Raj, a very different kettle of fish.
Charles Allen produced one of the key source books of the Raj revival in 1975: Plain Tales from the Raj, based on many hours of interviews he conducted for radio. He is himself something of an old India hand, having been born in Cawnpore in the twilight of British rule into a family with a long record of Indian service. Several more Indian books followed. Now, with this formidably expert, dramatic and thought- provoking account of one of his forebears, John Nicholson, and the others of the band known as 'Henry Lawrence's young men' who annexed and then administered the Frontier area in the 1840s and 1850s, Allen has paid tribute to a tough generation of early Anglo-Indians, without whom the Raj might never have come to pass. It is a complicated story, and for all his clear prose and narrative skill Allen some- times bewilders the reader with detail as he follows the fortunes of his eight main char- acters and their assorted superiors, rivals, subordinates and enemies between 1839 and 1857. Nicholson and his contempo- raries, the Soldier Sahibs of Allen's title, Who included characters famous in the mil- itary annals of Anglo-India, like Harry Lumsden of the Guides and Hodson of Hodson's Horse, arrived in India to fight in what was then the East India Company's Bengal Army. As Allen points out, they were usually younger sons from the landed gentry and were often of Scottish or Irish extraction, though they thought of them- selves as Englishmen. They were drawn to India in search of adventure, profit and reputation — and also out of feelings of fervent evangelical Christianity and confi- dent moral purpose. They believed it was a glorious fate to die in the service of their country, and many of them duly did. Allen manages to present such convictions with- out either endorsing or sneering at them.
Their opponents in the mountains and valleys of the North-West, along the Afghan border, were firstly the Afghans themselves, then the Sikhs and the many different tribal groups known collectively as the Pakhtun. These people were famous- ly proud and bloodthirsty, fiercely loyal to their friends and leaders and appallingly cruel and treacherous to their enemies. Allen's • stories of the many battles and uprisings, ambushes and massacres of the Frontier, as the young Englishmen strug- gled to bring the area under control, tell of remarkable courage and stamina on both sides, but they are not pretty. Not long after arriving in India, John Nicholson found the body of his younger brother, Alexander, lying among the rocks of the Khyber Pass; he was naked, and his genitals had been cut off and stuffed into his mouth. Alexander was 18. John, who was himself only 20, wrote to their mother. 'It is a consolation to me that he met a glorious death.' This ghastly event helped to turn Nicholson, writes Allen, 'into a war-hard- ened adult with a sense of destiny'. He cer- tainly became a soldier and administrator of legendary prowess; he also became a man renowned for floggings, capable of forcing an Indian who spat in his presence to lick his own spittle from the ground, who once displayed the severed head of an enemy in his office for several days.
If one of Charles Allen's aims has been to reveal what lay behind the Boy's Own adventure version of mid-Victorian Anglo- Indian history, it must be said that he has only partially succeeded. This is mainly because of a lack of the kind of material that can give a real insight into the well- concealed personal lives and emotions of the Soldier Sahibs; the memoirs they wrote later in life did not reveal much, nor did such letters home as have survived. Also, as Allen concedes, it was indeed a Boy's Own world; women played little or no part in it. Nicholson never married; those of his group who did married late, and with rare exceptions involved their wives as little as possible in their exploits. Their emotional energies went into their patriotism, their religion and to some extent into their intense, but rarely platonic, friendships with each other; as Allen shrewdly says, these young exiles 'were more like the Tal- iban than like ourselves'. Indeed, one of the themes of this book is the striking affinity and mutual respect that often came to exist between the English public- schoolboys and the mountain warriors. For both, physical courage was everything and women were a race apart.
With great dexterity, Charles Allen rounds up his cast of characters for their apotheosis and the last act of his book, the siege and recapture of Delhi by the English during the Indian Mutiny of 1857. Nichol- son, by then a general, lost his life leading, as always, from the front. Meanwhile Sir Henry Lawrence, his old patron, had been killed defending the Residency in Luc- know. These two events, which saved and established the Raj, soon passed into imperial legend. Towards the end of his account, it seems as if Charles Allen may have fallen under the spell of his ancestor, whom he describes as appearing to his beleaguered army as 'almost godlike in his moral strength'; it was not only the Indians, it seems, who ascribed extraordinary pow- ers to `Nikal Seyn'. But in the end Allen is too scrupulous and balanced a historian to go in for praise or blame. As he says, 'Moral confusion still colours our attitudes to men like Nicholson, and to British rule in India in general.' His book does not dis- pel that confusion, but it is nevertheless a considerable achievement.
'It's Rodgers Rodgers and Hammerstein. Pretend we haven't seen them. They make a song and dance out of everything.'
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