'Someone had blundered'
GOVERNORS-GENERAL OF INDIA
James Andrew Broun-Ramsay, Lord Dalhousie, 1848-1856
Dalhousie is one of the most controversial British rulers. He expanded the Indian Empire dramatically, moving into Burma and crushing the Sikh Empire. He laid down telegraph lines and railroads, and built up the subcontinent's postal network. His educational reforms would, in the long run, become foundational for India's modern school system.
And then there was the Doctrine of Lapse. Various British (English) historians have defended this policy- some out of expediency in the years of the 'lonely Kingdom' when criticising the imperial administrators and aristocrats of yesteryear was unwise, some who think it was a gamble that could have paid off in the long term under more able successors, and some who want to think that all the problems of the Empire were caused by Dalhousie's successor.
FitzRoy Somerset, Lord Raglan, 1856-1858
The short, glorious Russian War was an unexpected triumph for Britain and her allies. Much was made of the 'Great Pincer,' where Raglan's easy seizure of Sevastopol and the resulting diversion of Russian troops made possible the Royal Navy's descent upon Krondstadt and St Petersburg. The role of the French, Swedes, Piedmontese and Ottomans was not acknowledged at the time, or since.
Raglan was a hero, and had to be rewarded. An old man, he should never have been given his position in India, but the wave of popular enthusiasm for the 'Grandfather of Crimea' saw the Company bounced into asking him to take up the governor-generalship.
Throughout 1856, Raglan's aides worried that India was in the hands of an old man suffering from depression and dementia. To general surprise, Raglan's health survived the Indian summer, but it was believed that by the summer of 1857 the Governor-General could resign with dignity and hand the reigns back to a younger, more able man.
On March 29th, 1857, Sepoy Mangal Pandey was arrested for mutiny.
GRAND VIZIERS OF THE MUGHAL EMPIRE
Hakim Ahsanullah Khan, 1857
A poet and the personal physician of Emperor Bahadur Shah II, Ahsanullah Khan was too weak a man to lead the War of Renewal. The Emperor's closest advisor, he was absolutely unprepared for his patron to be thrust into the role of figurehead of national rebellion. His incompetence is best illustrated by his shameful dithering over the massacre of British prisoners in Delhi in 1857. Some of the rebel leaders were brutal as a deliberate strategy to make surrender to the vengeful British impossible. Others, like the elderly emperor, wished for no bloodshed against the defenceless prisoners and their families. Ahsanullah was too afraid to act, telling an aide that if he passed on the Emperor's orders to stop the killings 'if we remonstrate with them [the killers] now, they will kill us first and then murder the prisoners.'
It has been argued that 1857 was a battle of the ineffectual. On the one side, a Mughal court led by a Vizier totally unsuited to the urgent task of unifying the disparate rebel groups and forging them into a true nationalist alliance; facing him was a still formidable Company army who could survive the great storm so long as they took quick action to neutralise Delhi and entrench in the great cities until reinforcements arrived.
Unfortunately for the British, quick action was not a skill of Lord Raglan. The allies and subordinates who took Sevastopol were not present; instead, contradictory orders were dispatched all over the country, sending his scattered armies one way and then another, changing objective as the old man panicked, diminishing his limited resources when he needed to consolidate.
The Mughals still came close to losing many times in that first terrible year of the war; but eventually Bahadur Shah realised that though he had never chosen this path he was now irrevocably committed to it. He dismissed his poet-vizier, and in his place chose a rapidly rising officer.
Bakht Khan, 1857-1866
Once a subedar of the Company, Bakht Khan was a highly able man with a greater understanding of his colonial masters than that possessed by most of the rebel leaders. He rose to prominence as general of the rebel sepoys at Bareilly, and led his men to Delhi where it became apparent that he was the most able of the rebel generals present. The Emperor's son Mirza Zahiruddin had been appointed the leader of the rebel forces, but though intelligent and energetic he had no experience whatsoever. Mirza was quickly promoted still further to the ceremonial role of 'Commander in Chief, while Bakht became Grand Vizier and Lord Governor-General of the rapidly assembling army.
Leaving the civilian administration largely to Ahsanullah's aide Zahir Dehlvi, Bakht built up the greatest Indian army since the fall of the Khalsa. To Bakht's grateful astonishment, it was August before Raglan sent an army to besiege Delhi. He had waited until the first reinforcements had arrived in the sub-continent, but the governor-general was infuriated at the general who led them- another 'hero' of the Russian War, who seemed like a reliable pair of steady hands to lead the hastily thrown together First Relief Contingent. The man spent another three weeks arguing with Raglan over how the campaign should be conducted before finally leading his men to the Mughal capital- angry at the unexpected resistance along the way, and butchering civilians as he went.
Bakht Khan had built a formidable set of defensive works before Delhi; let the other Rebel generals go on the offensive throughout Northern India, he reasoned, and the British would waste far too many resources at the Imperial capital. The siege would take months before either side had to take decisive action; only a fool would try and storm Delhi in the first week.
On August 25, 1857, George Bingham, Lord Lucan inspired a poem.
TREATIES OF WITHDRAWAL FROM INDIA 'The Retreaties,' 'The Shameful Treaties,' 'The Glorious Concessions.'
TREATY OF DELHI, 1859
- signed by John Lawrence, acting governor-general of India and Governor of the Punjab, acknowledging Mughal sovereignty over Northern and central India.
TREATY OF LAHORE, 1865
- signed by Viscount Canning, governor of Bengal. The Sikh Army had been the great hope of a British reconquista- Lawrence's gamble that Duleep Singh could be used as a figurehead for the British attempt to undo the Humiliation of Delhi backfired disastrously. With Lawrence dead, and Duleep Singh the 'First of the Princes' the Mughal Empire now extended to the Punjab and the supposedly autonomous Sikh stewardship of the northwest.
TREATY OF GOA, 1887
- signed by Lord Ripon, though the collapse of British rule in Hyderabad and Mysore is generally traced to the great famine of the 1870s. Oddly, the next victory for Indian nationalism was delayed by Tsar Alexander, whose attempts to reach a warm water port in the Persian gulf saw tens of thousands of Russians die horribly in Afghanistan, Kashmir and Balochistan in what amounted to little more than a distraction for the Peacock Throne.
By the mid 1880s however, Delhi was free to send guns, gold and 'volunteers' across the border. The Treaty of Goa was not actually signed by the Mughals but by the newly independent princes, upon the neutral ground of Portuguese India (itself on borrowed time, of course.)
Their 'petition for annexation' would not be formally accepted until the 1890s.
TREATY OF CALCUTTA, 1921
- signed by Winston Churchill, shortly before his suicide.