The rights of tyrants
Philip Mason
RAVEN CASTLE: CHARLES NAPIER IN INDIA, 1844-51 by Priscilla Napier Michael Russell, £17.95, pp. 305 Sit Charles Napier was essentially a hero'; so wrote the DNB — and it is true. His virtues and his failings were heroic, and he aroused heroic passions both of love and enmity. The conquest of Sind, in which he was the commander, was a matter of bitter controversy during the 1840s, both in Britain and in India. Sir Charles himself summed up the dispute in one well-known phrase. 'It was', he said, 'a very useful, humane and advantageous piece of rascal- ity.' It was useful, both strategically and economically, for the growth of India, and it was humane because it gave the peasants of Sind a much better system of govern- ment than before; the rascality lay in the fact that the Amirs of Sind were in posses- sion and had offended the British mainly by infidelity to a treaty that had been forced on them. The Amirs were a loose confederacy of 18 robber barons, Baluchis, who had come down from the mountains into the plains of Sind and staked out their baronies only 60 years before. Nobody thought they were good rulers and most people thought the Sindis hated them, but in England and India there were people 'silly good men', Charles Napier called them — who were sorry for them and thought their sovereignty should be respected.
The relevance to recent events in the Gulf is obvious, and was again apparent three years later when we stopped short of annexing the Punjab after defeating the Sikhs in the First Sikh War. Charles Napier was strongly of the opinion that 'a moder- ate conquest' meant more bloodshed in the future. He was proved to be right two years later by the terrible slaughter of the Second Sikh War, and it was ironic that as a result of that slaughter he was blackmailed into going back to India as Commander-in- Chief by the Duke of Wellington, who told him: 'If you don't go, I must!'
Whether a tyrant's right to oppress should be respected is one question raised by this biography. Another is that Charles Napier identified the causes of the Mutiny 15 years before it happened. Officers who were too old before they got command;
young officers filled with racial arrogance; growing contempt for all things Indian; religious intolerance, and a pettifogging financial pedantry — he raised his voice against them all. The Indian soldier was traditionally entitled to an allowance when he served beyond the frontiers of his own government; he drew the allowance when he marched into Sind and later the Punjab to fight; when he had won the battles and the country was annexed it was withdrawn. But he was still just as far from home.
Priscilla Napier suggests in a splendid purple passage that the horrors of the Mutiny might have been avoided if Charles had had his way. But to cure these ills, he would have had to be Governor-General as well as Commander-in-Chief, with several more years of active life and an obedient ministry at home. If you want dry, scientific history, this is not your book. It is the kind of book a loving and industrious daughter might have written. It would be easy to find fault. I do not think arrangement is her strongest point; she darts ahead in time to tell us more about someone who crosses Charles's path; she can seldom resist a parenthesis about some picturesque char- acter, or a pungent aside of her own; and she is so soaked in family papers that the ordinary reader is sometimes hard put to it to know which William or which Emily of Charles's many dear relations she is talking about. But it would be petty to dwell on such things. She writes in a robust, not to say rumbustious, style, describing the home government as 'in a perpetual tizzy' about Russian aggression and the press as 'bang- ing on' about Charles's misdoings. She has, in fact, grown more and more like her hero as she writes about him, and with copious quotations from his letters and journals she has given us a vivid picture of the man she admires.
And what a man he was! Fierce but tender-hearted, instant in defence of the oppressed, constantly thinking of what he could do for the comfort of the men under his command and speaking out for them `with more passion than discretion'. He hated war with his reason but was never happier than on a campaign or in the heat of battle. Like Napoleon and Wellington, he seemed to deflect roundshot and bullets by the courage with which he faced them. He was bitter against what he disliked; the Military Board was 'the curse of India'; he would 'like to hang every contractor in India', but he was generous in praise 'this splendid army', he wrote again and again, 'this noble fellow'. He was a master of the telling homely phrase. Dealing with the Amirs of Sind was like negotiating with `a barrowful of eels% little plagues were `enough to fret my guts out'. Sometimes he dreamt of leading an army across the Oxus, like a second Alexander, and conquering half Asia — but he would have to be a sovereign for that, not a poor soldier `responsible to fools'. Next day he was humbly recording his sense of his in-
adequacy. 'Shrewd, wise, despotic', said Richard Burton of him — but he was kind, just and loving too. To read about him is to feel younger.
Previous page
