Natives under the British Raj British sahibs and their native servants (Ref 1) Many books or book chapters have been written on the Indian Mutiny, also called Rebellion, Uprising or First War of Independence. Among the earliest was The Causes of the Indian Mutiny (1873) by Sayyid Ahmed, described by historian P Spear as “the most searching Indian analysis of the upheaval”. We shall follow more recent books, starting with Christopher Hibbert’s The Great Mutiny 1857 (470 pages, Allen Lane 1978). Hibbert begins with an introductory remark that shouldn’t surprise us: ”Compared to the vast amount of material composed for and by the English, the Indian documentation on the Mutiny is extremely scanty.” [ Likewise historian Peter Liddle, author of 20 history books, has been studying the India Mutiny in preparation for the 150th Anniversary. He said he does not want to brush anything under the carpet. He is the founder of the Liddle Collection of First World War materials at the University of Leeds. He has put together an enormous amount of data on the experiences of soldiers in the First and Second World Wars. He has interviewed a number of Indian veterans who have lived in Britain for 50 years. Liddle said he was bewildered and frustrated by the experience — “I don’t mean this as a criticism but they were woefully ignorant when it came to expressing themselves in English”. When it came to 1857, Liddle spoke about the paucity of written material from the Indian side. More in Mutiny file, DTel 13May06] It is this virtual lack of Indian historical records that we have commented on before There is no substitute for an indigenous view but in its absence, we have to fall back on foreign narratives – of colonisers, explorers and scholars – which may be well coloured by their own cultural perspective. Hibbert provides a fascinating account of the conditions prevailing in mid-19th century India and the stark, unequal  relations between ruler and ruled. Lord Canning succeeded Lord Dalhousie as Governor-General in 1856. (He was the son of Prime Minister George Canning who died in 1827.) He was paid a generous salary of £25,000 with supplements by the East India Company, together with a large mansion and a huge band of servants. The British seem to have kept a record of everything. The military secretary, Lord Dunkellin, wrote: “It is most annoying that very little fresh air comes through all day… one lives shut up in a room with the blinds down to prevent the glare and heat and no one dares go out before or 5.30 pm at the earliest. Visits are paid between 11.30 and 2.00…” Cockroaches as big as mice ran along the floors; bats flew into the bedrooms; lizards crawled up the walls; red ants were so numerous that the legs of tables had to be placed in saucers of water. The Governor-General and Lady Canning had two servants each behind their chairs to flick away the flies with horse-tails. Another servant’s sole duty was to go round the house wiping the damp from the writing tables. Writing paper became unusable; books became mouldy and discoloured; shoes got furry with mildew in a day; hat linings erupted in ugly lumps. Dark servants glided into the room and stood immobile in silent submission for minutes on end. Lady Canning wrote: “These gliding people come and stand next to you, and will wait an hour with their eyes fixed on you and their hands joined as in prayer; you get startled to find them patiently waiting…” Lieutenant Frank Cubitt, an unmarried officer in the 5th Fusiliers, recorded his observations at some length. ”The morning parade was followed by a bath, reading the newspapers and breakfast. Then a stroll into the jungle with a gun to shoot any plumaged bird…Between 12 and 2, we called on Dum Dum society… then had tiffin followed by a siesta till 5 or 6 when the evening walk was taken. Dinner at seven, then dancing and merriment at some friend’s house or to the mess to play billiards or read the English papers...” His bed was enclosed by a white gauze mosquito curtains. To keep cool, a frame of wood and canvas was suspended from the ceiling and attached by a cord to the big toe of the servant whose duty it was to keep it in motion all the time by moving his leg. The bathroom next to the bedroom was paved with bricks; the sahib stood naked while servants splashed him with water from a series of red clay pots…Even the most junior officer was attended by a whole tribe of servants who normally lived with their families in the compound in mud huts. Cubitt had 13 servants – a bearer, groom, sweeper, water carrier, laundryman, gardener, several ‘punkah-wallahs’, a butler who arranged for ice, fresh fish and other items brought daily by a coolie from Calcutta. Officers were shaved by their servants while still half asleep in bed; other attendants wanted to fasten their braces, wipe their whiskers dry after washing, open huge umbrellas over their heads when they left their tents. At bath time, an officer wrote home: “when you are washing, one attendant hands the soap while another stands ready to hand over the towel… when you dress, a man is ready to put into your hand an item  the instant you need it…” Officers’ wives and daughters were even more indulged. “If they drop a handkerchief and say ‘boy!’, a wizened, skinny brownie creeps up, twiddles around them and creeps out as softly as a cat.” Native servants were liable to be thrashed if they were careless and have their month’s wages cut by half. William Russell, journalist for the Times who was in India in 1858, wrote he “was shocked to see two servants covered with plasters and bandages, lying on their charpoys moaning…Servants were rarely spoken kindly…” Clearly the natives had been completely subjugated and they bowed to the military and intellectual superiority of these foreigners and accepted their servile status.  By the early 1900s, a few thousand British personnel could control a country of 100 million people. Edward Said had written: “The basis of imperial authority was the mental attitude of the colonised. Their acceptance of subordination made empire durable.”  British soldiers, native sepoys (Ref 1) The Cawnpore (Kanpur) cantonment was a large military station that stretched for six miles along the south bank of the Ganges. The Europeans lodged in their barracks and the sepoys in their mud huts. In addition there were numerous public buildings, theatre, library, billiard rooms, assembly rooms for entertainment, several capacious ice-houses for the storage of ice-water. There were Freemasons’ Lodge, the inevitable Anglican church, chapels for Roman Catholics and other denominations, burial ground and a race course. In line with British colonial policy, the European regiments were segregated from the natives. “The handful of Europeans occupied four times the city space as the thousands of Hindoos and Mussulmen.” The soldiers had their own bazaars with silversmiths, dealers in sweetmeats, fruit, fruit, beer and spirits, tobacco and bhang. There were barbers, butchers, tailors and prostitutes. The soldiers spent most of their time in the bazaars when they were not sleeping. Prostitutes and syphilis At the far end of the bazaar was the prostitutes’ quarter (lol-bibbis); the women, bare-breasted, wore pantaloons, and rings and bangles all over there arms and legs. Some of the younger girls were quite attractive.  British soldiers frequented the lol-bibbis and a quarter of the patients in the military hospitals suffered from syphilis. The Queen’s regiments began to supply healthy girls for their men to discourage them going to the bazaars. A dozen clean girls could be attached to a Regiment and they were well housed and cannot leave the station without permission. They were paid on a scale - four annas (quarter rupee) to service privates. They were low caste women supplied by the East India Company at the rate of Rs 5 per head. Only about 12 in a 100 men in a regiment were allowed official wives for which they received at most Rs 5 if she were European and half that if native. But as one said: “You didn’t need a wife. There was enough comfort around.” Drink The soldiers were fonder of alcohol. Men carried huge barrels of stout from the antive canteen to their barracks and they were soon helplessly drunk, 20 of them lying unconscious. The native police, supervised by a European inspector usually arrived at the scene to deal with the matter. The police would drop nets of the drunkards; heads to kock them to the ground. Sergeant Pearman wrote in his memoirs: “  You can get three pints of spirits for one rupee (two shillings)… in the canteen you could have as much as you liked…. There were men dying every day from the ffects of drink.. Grog (drink) was the rage in India.” Amused contempt for the natives The natives were usually treated with amused contempt and soon became accustomed to insults and blows. Sergeant Pearman recalled a typical incident how a British soldier hurled a boot at one of the ‘black men’ who came into the barracks with large earthenware pots on their heads, calling out “Hot coffee, Sahib”. The pot broke and the steaming coffee ran down the poor man’s body. The native quarters were exceedingly primitive. Most sepoys were married and allowed to stay with their wives and relatives. Each sepoy was allotted a small piece of ground and was expected to build his own hut (made of bamboo and mud, thatched with straw.  Their pay was 7 rupees a month, a third earned by Europeans but was reduced by various fees and deductions. Most were Hindus, vegetarians eating chupattis, dhal and rice. The smoking of opium and use of ganja and bhang were common. The British (under Lord Dalhousie) had brought the wonders of science to India and transformed the infrastructure through the electric telegraph, railway and steam engines. The villagers thought the engines were driven by demons. The British did not hesitate to pull down temples if they came in the way. In contrast, Indian conditions seemed so primitive and Indian culture ridiculed rather than respected. British officials agreed with Macaulay that this culture consisted of no more than “medical doctrines that would disgrace an English horse-shoe maker; astronomy that would be laughed at by girls at an English boarding school; history made up of kings who were 30 feet high and reigned 30,000 years; their geography made of seas of treacle and butter.” Hibbert wrote (pg56) wrote: In a few native regiments, the British officers did not merely ignore their men – they could actually abuse them on parade, swearing at them in the ‘most insulting language imaginable’. A British resident wrote: “The sepoy is [regarded as] an inferior creature. He sworn at and treated roughly, called ‘nigger’, addressed as ‘suar’ (pig), an epithet most approbrious to the native, especially the Mussulman. The older officers are less guilty but the younger ones regard it as an excellent joke, as evidence of their superiority over the sepoy to treat him as an inferior animal.” The government was keen to convert the Indians to Christianity – handing our Bibles to students on completion of their course, teaching the gospel to prisoners. Muslim prisoners were required to shave off their beards, symbols of their faith. Brass lotas (which could be used as weapons) were replaced by earthenware drinking vessels, harder to clean by polluted lips. In hospitals, native patients – men or women, high or low, all had to share the same wards. It was incredibly demoralising and frustrating for the natives, who seemed helpless to resist. Torture in the British Raj (Ref 2) After the outbreak of the Indian Mutiny, Karl Marx wrote of “the official Blue Books on the subject of East India Company’s torture which were laid before the House of Commons during the sessions of 1856-57”. These reports confirmed “the universal use of torture as a financial institution of British India”. For example, revenue officers and the police routinely used torture to collect taxes. The practice of torture was blamed on the lower Hindu officials; it is claimed that British officials were not involved and “did their best to prevent it”. What did this torture involve? It ranged from rough manhandling to flogging and placing in the stocks. There were other extreme measures: - searing with hot irons; dipping in wells and rivers till the victim was half suffocated - squeezing the testicles; putting pepper and red chillies in the eyes or private parts - prevention of sleep; ripping the flesh with pincers; suspension from tree branches - imprisoning in a room used for storing lime. The torture regime is a hidden history; book after book remains silent on the subject. In addition, servants were routinely abused as ‘niggers’. Assaulted and beaten by their masters. Lord Elgin writing in Aug 1857 described British feelings towards India as “detestation, contempt, ferocity… an absolute callousness that must be witnessed to be understood and believed. War correspondent William Russell witnessed a fellow Briton attacking with a huge club “a group of coolies for idling. leaving them maimed and bleeding…” References 1. C Hibbert, The Great Indian Mutiny 1857 (Allen Lane 1978) 2. J Newsinger, The Blood never dried (Bookmarks 2006)