Passage from India
Francis King
A Matter of Honour Philip Mason (Cape
The two-hundred-year history of the India° Army from 1746 to 1947 poses two Malntr enigmas. Firstly, how did it come about tha Indian soldiers were prepared to fight remarkable fidelity and courage for &le," masters, not merely within their own sll"; continent but in places as remote ad Passchendaele, Salonika, Singapore an, Baghdad? Secondly, by what miracle did.; force that never numbered more than 200,0l", manage to dominate some 300 million peoPte Mr Mason's fascinating book provides On' vincing answers to both these questions. The most cynical answer to the first wo1 of course, be that these were mercenaries icie whom fighting had become a family ti'a like any other and who, generation afle, generation, were schooled by an iron ""; cipline to carry out whatever orders vie°0 given to them and to endure whateveo hardship and dangers came their way, evelln„ti the point of voluntarily courting death. Ph'e Mr Mason rightly sees more to this, as th"e title of his book suggests. In pre-1914 India,,"is points out, a man's honour was involved in ti loyalty to his religious faith, to his familNi. his caste, to his village but rarely to his nati:o. II — that still amorphous and polyglot :he cumulation of jarring communities. 'in recruit who joined the army, usuallY obedience to family or village tradition, 1119:,t have felt a vague allegiance to the Grey"' White Queen or one of her descendants; b„t$ basically his allegiance was, as Mr mason Pio it, "to the regiment, to the army, Per,11,affie especially to a single officer, perhaps to a" officers of his regiment." The fact that t"of t allegiance was not founded, as in the cas_eDy the British soldier, on patriotism explains woo the characters of the British officers lof above all the British generals in commalwoe the sepoys could make all the differeaco between cowardice, slackness and mutinY the one hand and valour, efficiency ,a.o. loyalty on the other. Commanders like Roberts and, in our own day, Slim could W-d, miracles with their sepoys. On the other /1311 throughout the history of the Indian Ar there were commanders like General 1,1°,Yeo (". . . old and infirm . . grievously afflicr;o: with gout . . . could not walk . . could ride . . .") for whom the Indian soldier he neither love nor awe and under whorl')
morale rapidly disintegrated. tio°
Mr Mason's answer to the second clues of how such a minute force could keep suciep vast population in subjection to its alien ra,"o, is basically that, first, there was little tot tionalist feeling in India until the dawn of :50
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twentieth century and, second, that vr-tct ff dt hegemony was maintained by what, in e-eort was a massive confidence trick. For a cori fidence trick to be successful it is nect not merely for the duped to have confi—nvt in their dupers but for the dupers to , ot confidence in themselves. Once the challe'iii/ of the Mutiny had been decisively rbet';,,ol Indians were finally convinced of the in v:,'"00 ble power of Britain: and the British were less convinced of the invincible poWe'vef themselves and of their right to role ?ti51) subservient millions. It was when the Br„"„rtq,4 began to lose that overweening self-' fidence that the Empire began to crumble'
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If Mason skilfully demonstrates the sad ess by which the comradeship that had ted between English and Indians in the La the British East India Company came "e gradually eroded in the nineteenth cen. This distancing of the two nations from .4 other has often been ascribed to the tat of the Victorian 'memsahib' on the e. A man who kept an Indian woman, and had children by her, inevitably drew far er to the country of his exile and learned .kore about it than one who lived in strict , I and moral segregation. The 'memsahib' Id see to the enforcement of the prevailing rian code of conduct: concubinage with subject race was reprehensible firstly ;Ise it was immoral and secondly because I at that period was regarded as anything 1t2eautiful. (In her Sketches of Hindustan 1 .47 , Emma Roberts records that some littstious English ladies objected to black th How much worse was a black woman t,e bedroom than in the kitchen!) But the `°rian lady apart, the acceleration of I Punications that . followed on the in) `Ion of the steamship and the establish' 4t, of a land route from Alexandria to Suez teir no doubt by itself have caused the en. Newspapers, magazines, books and all InXuries of middle-class English life r Ine increasingly available. Whereas at the Clive few British officers who joined ..‘,"°tripany's army had any hope of seeing native country again, by the time of 6 Di rtS every officer enjoyed regular leaves. r b_land had now become 'home': India a 14").°L intermittent exile. r, Mason paints a skilful picture of the 'bet's' mess as a kind of adult extension of 'flglish public school. On the debit side tisebe set the philistinism that would stigas a mug' any officer who (the words r 'ounghusband's) "neither rode nor shot. riPtlaYed games, who drank water at Mess, rt to bed early and swotted at algebra, ° 0,,,Ifications or French"; the callow n6ance that, basing itself on an acquaino`e With India limited to bazaars, prosti ° and the hangers-on of the barracks, vIssed all 'natives' other than sepoys as 15 kens, liars and crooks; and the emotional atUrity that could make Yeats-Brown of titgill Lancer' fame confess, that in common 'Ise lives of most of his contemporaries in rrient, his own was "as sexless as any s at this time . . . What is good for the a,.sts priest is (I suppose) good for the InLavalry subaltern, who has work to do tile priest) which he could scarcely perch)" hampered by family ties." du the credit side must be set astonishing ranee, courage, stoicism, self-sacrifice h„sense of duty; and, in addition, that v; e isatory genius that so often extricated dian Army from seemingly impossible N'Ions. When I was a boy out in India, one quncles, an Indian Army officer, was nered by a sepoy who had failed to receive tornotion that he thought to be due to lears later I met the woman who, as the °f the commanding officer, had been liott.s the task of breaking the news to my ear, Frankly," she told me, "I absolutely od'ed the task. I knew that she had foreign t, and I was afraid she would make a is? fuss." It was part of the code of the It " in India never to make a ghastly fuss; , sickness, exile, the vagaries of the Iete. even death were endured without it. s-Lason is no apologist for Empire; but qjli. 4 L Wir 1) et ete sant book demonstrates that though Were many things done by us in India re:‘ Leh we may indeed indulge in the guilty 4"alsost-beating so fashionable today, much 0111. achieved for which we can justly feel 0 ' Pleis rke King's latest novel, A Game Of PaWill be published by Hutchinson in the "II Of this year.
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