The lowland territory of Sind, bordering on the Arabian Sea and made fertile by the waters of the Indus, lay far to the south of the mountains of Afghanistan, where the British had been so humiliated in 1842. Largely Muslim, the country had been ruled since the eighteenth century by the Baluchi Talpurs, an extended family of amirs, or princes, from the western hills of Baluchistan. They ran a competent administration, devoting themselves to an impressive system of canal-building, and internal peace had long prevailed.
The amirs at Hyderabad, in Lower Sind, had been visited in 1827 by Dr James Burnes, an officer adventurer, who wrote enthusiastically about the potential value of the Indus as the high road to Central Asia, and in 1831 they had allowed his brother, Alexander, to pass through their territory to take a gift of horses to Ranjit Singh in the Punjab. The amirs signed a commercial treaty with the British in the 1830s, and allowed access to the Indus by British traders, many of whom brought opium down to Karachi from the fields of Rajputana. The amirs also allowed Colonel Henry Pottinger to set up an office in Hyderabad and call himself the British Resident, but they refused to countenance a British military presence.1
When the commercial treaties came to be renewed in 1838, Pottinger requested the right to march soldiers through Sind on the way to Kabul, and to garrison a number of intervening towns. His request went beyond any clause of the existing treaties, and the amirs were loth to agree, but when the British threatened them with the sack of Hyderabad they bent over backwards to be accommodating. They ordered boats, camels and timber to be made available to the British army, and paid large sums to defray the expenses of the troops. While individual amirs perceived that they might secure some benefit from a close if unequal friendship with the British, their Baluchi soldiers took a more nationalistic position. Many opposed the decision of the amirs, and there were frequent attacks on British supply lines during the occupation of Kabul.
Sind in the 1840s was ruled by six senior amirs, each controlling a different area of the country. Mir Rustam Khan, who lived at Khairpur in Upper Sind, was the oldest. A man in his seventies, he was long wary of too close a relationship with the British. Mir Ali Murad, his younger brother, looked more favourably on the new power in the land, and had hopes that the British would support his claim to succeed his father. Four amirs perceived as the most powerful and influential - Mir Nasir Khan, Mir Mahmood Khan, Mir Shahdad Khan and Mir Sobdar Khan - ruled in partnership at Hyderabad. A sixth amir, Sher Mohammed Khan, enjoyed considerable independence from the others, and controlled the south-east of the country from his base at Mirpur.
After the British retreat from Kabul, several amirs felt that the unequal treaties had brought them little beneflt. Mir Nasir suggested sending an envoy to London to outline their complaints, while others contacted the Sikh rulers of the Punjab to see whether joint action might be taken against the British. Alarmed by this possibility, Lord Ellenborough, the governor-general in Delhi, decided to deal with the amirs in a new way. For years they had been cajoled into friendship; now he decided to enforce fresh treaties through military threats, entrusting the task to General Charles Napier, lately in charge of the repression of the Chartists in northern Britain. Napier was an ageing newcomer, an officer with no previous service in India.
The relative merits of the rule of the amirs became the subject of bitter argument within the British ruling elite. Some with long experience in India believed that the amirs were useful allies who should be left in control; they spoke out flrmly against the policy of military intervention. Major James Outram believed that ‘all classes in the country were as happy as those under any government in Asia’, and he described how the sense of amity among the Amirs ‘was dwelt upon by all who visited these countries with wonder and admiration’2
Late in 1842 the amirs held meetings with Napier, both in Karachi and in Hyderabad, and ‘prepared all things requisite for receiving him with honour; they despatched a palanquin ornamented with gold for his conveyance, and dromedaries equipped with gold and silver furniture for the officers who attended him’ Yet it was all to no purpose. They were presented with draft treaties that even the most pro-British among them found difficult to accept. When they rejected them, Napier vented his displeasure, describing them as ‘tyrannical, drunken, debauched, cheating, intriguing, and contemptible’ Faced with ‘such atrocious scoundrels’, he wrote, it would be ‘virtuous to roll them over like ninepins’.
The flrst to be rolled over was the ageing Mir Rustam. Deposed by Napier, he was replaced by Mir Ali Murad, his pliant younger brother, and then, as a warning to the other amirs to refrain from resistance, Napier’s forces destroyed the abandoned desert fortress of Imamgarh in Upper Sind.
Some of the amirs might have wished to continue to appease the British general, but matters were taken out of their hands. Their Baluchi soldiers were determined to resist, and 5,000 of them assembled outside Hyderabad. They were convinced that Napier planned to seize the country: ‘Let Napier slay us, and after that let him plunder our houses, which shall not be available to the spoiler but over our dead bodies.’
Mir Shahdad Khan, one of the four powerful amirs, was persuaded to join the Baluchis, and in February 1843 they attacked and destroyed the British Residency at Hyderabad. Its defenders made a humiliating escape to boats on the Indus. Napier now had the excuse he had been hoping for; the way was open to attack and destroy the army of the amirs.
Two days later, in a dry river bed outside Hyderabad, 35,000 Baluchi soldiers came under attack by Napier’s force and were defeated at the battle of Miani, a decisive encounter that brought Sind into the British Empire. The Baluchi artillery was overwhelmed by British guns, and their soldiers were mown down. The Baluchis retreated, leaving 5,000 corpses behind in the river bed; the British casualties were counted at 256. Napier had put his faith in the Irish soldiers in his army, ‘strong of body, high-blooded, fierce, impetuous soldiers’, and they had not disappointed him.
After the battle, Napier advanced towards the fort at Hyderabad and, according to the amirs’ own account, Mir Nasir Khan rode into Napier’s camp of his own free will, and surrendered his sword to the general. Napier returned the sword ‘and said some words of encouragement to the effect that in twenty-five days time the Amirs’ affairs should be settled to their satisfaction, and that they should retain their country’.
It was not to be, and any hope that the amirs might have entertained that they would be allowed to remain in power was rudely removed a few days later, when they were obliged to surrender their fort. The principal amirs were detained and imprisoned, and the apartments of their women were broken into. The soldiers ‘plundered them of all the female ornaments of gold and silver, dresses, etc., that they contained, and tore off the ornaments that the ladies wore on their legs and feet. The unhappy ladies, overwhelmed with shame and terror, fled from the city’. The British needed every jewel they could lay their hands on to pay their soldiers. The personal property and the household effects of the amirs was put up for auction, and Napier himself received ?50,000 in prize money. The captured amirs were sent first to Bombay, and then, a year later, to exile in Bengal.
Sher Mohammed Khan was the last surviving amir, a relatively independent ruler based at Mirpur. Escaping after the battle of Miani, he decided to fight on. He was a popular figure, and many Baluchis rallied to his standard. His troops clashed with Napier’s in March at Dubba, east of Hyderabad. The battle was a repetition of Miani, although the numbers involved were smaller. Sher Mohammed had 15,000 men, Napier had 5,000. After some stiff fighting, the
Baluchis abandoned the struggle, losing about 2,000 killed and wounded. The British casualties were 270.
Although defeated, Sher Mohammed continued to pose a threat to Napier’s force. He moved around the country with an army of several thousand; local people provided food and kept him informed of Napier’s movements. The Baluchis were helped by the hot weather, which made active operations difficult for the British; several soldiers died of heat stroke, and Napier himself was incapacitated for a time. Eventually, in June, Sher Mohammed’s forces were surprised near the village of Shahdadpur by a British troop that captured three of their guns and won an almost bloodless victory. Sher Mohammed slipped away to the north, to take refuge in Afghanistan.
As governor of the new imperial province of Sind, Napier called, with typical pomposity, for the creation of ‘a new Egypt’. It was meant as a tribute to the achievements of Mohammed Ali Pasha, the progressive Ottoman viceroy established by British treaty in 1840 as the hereditary ruler of Egypt. The Baluchis were unimpressed by Napier’s promises, and referred to him as shaitan-ka-bhai - ‘Satan’s brother’.
The British conquest of the large Muslim territory of Sind did not go unnoticed elsewhere. James Richardson, the great African traveller who journeyed across the Sahara in 1845, arrived at Ghadamis in Libya and encountered Haji bin Musa Ethani, the aged chief of the most influential local families.3
After a short silence he addressed me: ‘Christian! do you know Sindh?’
I replied, ‘I know it.’
‘Are not the English there?’
‘Yes, I said.
He then turned. . . abruptly to me, ‘Why do the English go there and eat up all the Musulman? Afterwards you will come here.’
I replied, ‘The Amirs were foolish and engaged in a conspiracy against the English of India; but the Musulman in Sindh enjoyed the same rights and privileges as the English themselves.’
‘That is what you say”, he rejoined, and then continued: ‘Why do you go so far from home to take other people’s countries from them[?]’
I replied, ‘The Turks do the same; they come here in the Desert.’
‘Ah! you wish to be such oppressors as the Turks’, he continued very bitterly, and then told me not to talk anymore.
General Napier’s treatment of the amirs was ‘the most unprincipled and disgraceful that has ever stained the annals of our empire in India, wrote Henry Pottinger, long the champion of the amirs.4 For several months Napier ruled the country under martial law, reintroducing the practice of flogging prisoners, abandoned by earlier rulers. He also organised a local police force, modelled on the paramilitary Irish constabulary established in the 1820s.
The more recalcitrant Baluchi prisoners were exiled to the new colony at Aden, and several amirs died soon after in captivity: Mir Rustam in Poona in 1844, Mir Nasir in Bengal in 1845, and Mir Sobdar in 1846. Only Sher Mohammed, who had taken refuge in Afghanistan, was permitted to return to Sind, in 1853.5
Far from Sind, in Kolhapur, a small princely state south of Bombay, close to the Portuguese territory of Goa, a rebellion broke out in September 1844. There had been ‘a spirit of uneasiness’ in the region ever since Napier’s campaign in Sind, noted the governor of Bombay, the ubiquitous General Sir George Arthur. ‘Many Indians’ hoped, he suggested, to be able to ‘turn out’ the British, with the bulk of the army away on a distant frontier across the sea. The ‘long unquiet’ country of the south Marathas, with its ‘petty independent chiefs’ and its ‘volatile population’, was quick to seize its chance.
Kolhapur had remained aloof from the earlier Maratha wars against the British, and its rajah had steadily resisted British encroachments in the 1820s. Things changed in 1843 when, during the minority of the rajah, the British imposed a Brahmin regent, Daji Krishna Pandit, controlled by a political agent sent down from Bombay. The reforms of the land tax introduced by this new regime stirred memories of earlier rebellions, and a widespread revolt was sparked off in 1844.
The first to rebel were the troops in the garrisons of the hill forts surrounding Kolhapur, including Bhudargad, Samangad, Panhala and Vishalgad. At these historic forts, the soldiers rejected British rule and locked themselves behind closed gates.
‘The hill chiefs took up arms’, according to the near-contemporary account by Cooke Taylor, and Daji Pandit showed every sign of giving in to the rebels. Mr Reeves, the British political agent, was in favour of a firm response, and troops were sent down from Bombay. But they ‘bungled the business of fighting, and for several months confusion and alarm prevailed’.6
The defenders of the hill forts repulsed the soldiers sent to besiege them, and the revolt soon spread to Kolhapur itself. Babaji Ahirekar emerged as the rebel leader, and his militia seized Daji Pandit and the British regent, and established their own independent government. Now seriously alarmed, the British sent out Colonel James Outram from Bombay. Outram recommended a peaceful strategy, suggesting that rebels who surrendered should be granted a free pardon, but this was vetoed by General Arthur, who favoured tougher measures.7 The fort at Samangad was recaptured in October by General Delamotte.
The rebels at Kohlapur negotiated with Outram, and Daji Pandit was released, but Babaji Ahirekar escaped with 500 militiamen to the fort at Bhudargad. Delamotte surrounded the fort in November, but Babaji Ahirekar escaped to Panhala. Here the rebels seized Colonel Ovans as a hostage. Ovans, the British Resident at Satara, had been on a tour of the area. Outram secured his release, and the fort came under attack from Delamotte’s troop in December. Babaji Ahirekar was killed, and many rebels were captured.
The country then ‘swarmed with British troops’, but resistance continued in the district of Concan, between the mountains and the sea. Here the rebels ‘kept the Bombay troops busy by guerrilla warfare and bush-fighting’.8 Several rebel chiefs escaped across the frontier into Goa, but the Portuguese authorities, fearing a British invasion, returned them to India. General Arthur commented peevishly that it was ‘impossible to tolerate this petty state receiving marauders and brigands who fly from justice’ The cost of crushing the rebellion was charged to the local administration of Kolhapur, and was paid to the Bombay government in instalments.
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