9 The Hard Road to Sagauli

9

 

 

The Hard Road to Sagauli

 

In the post-monsoon season of 1819, the newest recruit to the Bengal Civil Service’s Foreign and Political Department arrived at Delhi, en route to the Himalaya. Brian Houghton Hodgson was, in the words of his first biographer, a ‘pretty boy’ whose delicately pink cheeks made him seem younger than his eighteen years. The heat of Calcutta and a fragile constitution had almost ended his career before it had begun, but thanks to influential connections he was on his way to the cooler hills of Kumaon, newly under the control of the British.

Hodgson dutifully presented himself to the resident at Delhi, General Sir

David Ochterlony, now sixty-one years of age, gammon-faced and white haired, the Company’s oldest ‘political’ encountering its youngest. Ochterlony conducted his private life like a nawab, a ‘white Mughal’, promenading each afternoon on the banks of the Yamuna river with his bibis, his common-law local wives, each on their own elephant. Hodgson was unimpressed, noting ‘the costly and pompous style then inseparable from our Indian embassies’. He was a product of Haileybury, a school established to train servants of empire who wouldn’t indulge in that kind of thing. Ochterlony seemed to Hodgson the living representation of the dangers of ‘going native’. Ironically, and in his own quiet way, Hodgson would himself become a late flowering of an orientalism already out of fashion: ‘marrying’ his own Muslim bibi and becoming a scholarly authority on the world he inhabited, a world that Ochterlony himself had conquered: the kingdom of Nepal.

The excesses and corruption of the East India Company had by the early

nineteenth century created a new narrative among critics and political thinkers. In engaging and even identifying with Indian culture, they claimed, European Christian values had been subverted and debauched. Historians and thinkers like James Mill, writing in the Edinburgh Review, argued it was the moral duty of the East India Company to civilise India, to break down its entrenched superstition, not, as Sir William Jones had done at Fort William College, ‘to employ the lights of a people still semi-barbarous’. There was no question of this being done with the democratic consent of the Indian people: their ‘moral and political situation’ made that impractical. ‘A simple form of arbitrary government tempered by European honour and European intelligence is the only form which is now fit for Hindustan.’

Ochterlony, born in Massachusetts to a Scottish father, had arrived in

India more than forty years earlier, when Warren Hastings was governor general and Britain was consolidating its hard-won position on the subcontinent. Commissioned into the Bengal Native Infantry, he had fought as a subaltern in the Second Anglo-Mysore War, been wounded, losing an eye, and then imprisoned, to be released only at the end of hostilities. In 1803, and by then a major, he had commanded a battalion in the Second Anglo-Maratha War. After the capture of Delhi he was appointed resident at the Mughal court, and when Yashwant Rao Holkar laid siege to its famous Red Fort to liberate the Mughal emperor, Ochterlony was on the battlements directing its successful defence. Later he was sacked as resident in favour of another Scot, Archibald Seton, adding a streak of bitterness to a mercurial temperament. In the flood of action Ochterlony was eager and resourceful; thwarted, he could be sour.

In 1808, Ochterlony’s career blossomed once again. He was appointed

agent for relations with the Sikh states under their capable emperor Ranjit Singh, whose sphere of influence met the British along the Sutlej river. The two men shared a common affliction: Ranjit Singh had lost the sight of one eye during a childhood bout of smallpox. ‘The natives have an idea that a person possessed of one eye only, sees much farther than those who are blessed with two, and is better able to conduct a difficult negociation,’ wrote a correspondent for the Asiatic Journal in 1835, ten years after Ochterlony’s death.

It was generally supposed that he had been selected on account of the necessity of sending some person able, from similar circumstances of mental and bodily conformation, to cope with so subtle an adversary.

In doing so he burnished his reputation as a sharp-witted politician who

could put himself in the mind of his indigenous adversaries.

Ochterlony’s appointment also brought him into contact with the

expanding Gorkhali regime. In the aftermath of the Qing victory at Rasuwagadhi in 1792 and the expulsion of the Knox mission from Kathmandu, Bhimsen Thapa renewed Gorkha’s westward expansion by sending the king’s army into Garhwal under the command of a distant cousin, an old warhorse called Amar Singh Thapa. To give thanks for his victories, Amar Singh built a temple for pilgrims at the holy mountain village of Gangotri. Yet the excesses of the Gorkhali occupation were notorious. The imposition of heavy taxes, demands for forced labour and violent abuses, including rape, in Gorkha’s western provinces led to large-scale depopulation of the middle hills, despite exhortations of restraint from Kathmandu. Kumaon, which had been conquered many years before Garhwal, suffered longer; the British would use such behaviour to stir up resentment before their war with Nepal.

Four years later, Amar Singh’s troops were still moving west beyond the

Yamuna river towards the Sutlej and the borders of Ranjit Singh’s Sikh Empire, gradually sweeping up the thirty or so tiny kingdoms and principalities crammed into a habitable area not much bigger than the English Lake District. Almost every valley in this rugged terrain had its own Rajput lineage: royal debris swept uphill centuries before on the rising tide of Muslim expansion. In theory their princes paid tribute to the Mughal court; in reality many of these mountain fief-doms weren’t worth the bother. To the Mughal emperors, these mountains were most useful as the source of their ice, brought down in the hot summer months, first by river and then on the backs of porters. However, Amar Singh Thapa’s religious mentor and astrologer, Shiva Dat Rai, happened to come from one of these mini-kingdoms, a place called Bilaspur. (The late eighteenth-century traveller George Forster, the first Briton to traverse Central Asia, described Bilaspur as existing ‘in a state of deep confusion and filth’.) Shiva Dat Rai now persuaded Amar Singh Thapa to attack Bilaspur’s bitter enemies in neighbouring Hindur to the south. With that accomplished, Shiva Dat Rai urged the general to restore territories Bilaspur had lost on the west bank of the Sutlej and defeat the enterprising raja, Sansar Chand, who had taken them. This action brought the Gorkhali general Amar Singh Thapa to the foot of the most famous stronghold in the Himalaya: Kangra.

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Forts were a key feature of control in the Himalaya, at the heart of local

kingdoms and principalities from Bhutan in the east to Ladakh in the west, and Kangra was among the most significant. The Mughals had kept a garrison there long after their power had faded elsewhere in the Himalaya. Now they were finally gone. If Bilaspur was a fossil of forgotten glories, the kingdom of Kangra was different: a larger, reinvigorated federation of smaller states occupying much of the modern Indian state of Himachal Pradesh. By the time of its confrontation with Amar Singh Thapa, Kangra had become a vibrant and cultured kingdom under its raja Sansar Chand, who had reclaimed his patrimony from the fading Mughals. With Kangra back in his family’s control, Sansar Chand set about restoring the fortunes of his dynasty. Having done so, he was able to indulge his passion for the arts, establishing ateliers in his kingdom and commissioning a new palace at Sujanpur. Kangra was the crucible for what became known as the Pahari school, one of the great flowerings of Himalayan art. Yet in seizing territory from Bilaspur in 1805, Sansar Chand sowed the seeds of his own destruction.

To start with, things went well for Sansar Chand. He sent troops across

the Sutlej to harry Amar Singh Thapa on his flank and stir up trouble among the mini-states the Gorkhali general had so recently conquered. Having dealt with that problem, Amar Singh’s attack on Kangra itself spluttered to a halt. Rumours swirled in Kathmandu that Amar Singh was being dilatory in the siege; had he taken a bribe from Sansar Chand to allow supplies through? Bhimsen Thapa sent his brother Nain Singh to finish the job but he died during the assault. Bhimsen then decided to negotiate, and since Sansar Chand was a Rajput, sent two aristocrats to reach a settlement: Rudravir Shah and Dalbhanjan Pande, cousin to the recently executed Damodar. Amar Singh, a Khas hill-man, took the arrival of the aristocratic Rudravir and Dalbhanjan as a snub, so when they agreed to leave Kangra in return for an indemnity, Amar Singh accused the pair of taking a bribe themselves, poisoning their reputation at court. The siege of Kangra was renewed.

Both sides now courted the influence of Ranjit Singh and the Sikh

Empire, where Ochterlony was establishing relations on behalf of the British. Local hill-states, like Chamba and Turagarh, fed up with the rapacious nature of Gorkhali armies, began to withhold supplies from Amar Singh’s troops, who became weakened from disease and hunger. Ranjit Singh finally intervened, driving the Gorkha army back across the Sutlej, but he took Kangra for himself. Sansar Chand would die a pensioner of the Sikhs, shorn of his kingdom; the Sutlej would remain the far western extent of the Gorkhali state.

Having ground to a halt at the Sutlej, conflict now flared up once more

between the East India Company and the Gorkhas, but this time it wasn’t trade that tipped the Company into attacking Nepal. Following the dismal results of their missions to Kathmandu, those of Kirkpatrick in 1793 and Knox in 1804, the British had been losing interest in Himalayan trade, which had anyway dried up in the east and in the west was jealously guarded by Ranjit Singh, who now controlled the Kashmiri wool trade. Rather, the issue that triggered war involved tax revenues: specifically revenues from twenty-two villages in the Butwal region north of the city of Gorakhpur, now in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh and close to modern Nepal’s southern border. The Gorkhas saw these as belonging to Palpa, which was now governed by Bhimsen Thapa’s father. The Company regarded them as part of Awadh – then known as Oudh – which the British now controlled.

In arguing with the Gorkhalis about these villages, the British were

caught between two ways of seeing themselves: as a commercial company, doing whatever was necessary to protect its balance sheet, in which case the figures at stake did not justify expensive conflict; or else as a government, with an obligation to protect the state’s integrity, in which case the revenues ought to be protected as a matter of principle. But while the Company’s governors at Calcutta might have fretted over the commercial opinion of the Court of Directors in London and whether conflict was actually worthwhile, Bhimsen Thapa in Kathmandu saw the British simply as acquisitive empire-builders, not unlike himself: the British would concede only if a greater prize could be offered. To his general Amar Singh Thapa, obsessing over his defeat by Ranjit Singh, it made perfect sense to approach the Company not as antagonists but as potential allies, joining forces to throw the Sikhs out of Kangra fort. The Gorkha regime clearly and presciently assumed that since the British would end up fighting the Sikhs anyway they might as well get on with it. In the hope of bringing the British on side, Amar Singh handed back villages on the plains south of Hindur that he had grabbed from the British not long before. In 1808, and newly appointed agent for British relations with Ranjit Singh, Ochterlony found all this baffling: on the one hand being in conflict with the Ghorkas, on the other being courted by them. It was, he complained, ‘very difficult to assign motives for the actions of men who seem hardly to possess the faculty of reason’.

If the Company was caught between two ways of seeing itself, then it

also had two views of the world it administered, one Indian, the other European, a dichotomy that can be reduced to one word: maps. In the early nineteenth century the southern fringe of the Himalaya was a confusing place. The notion of spatial ownership, of chunks of land defined on maps of great accuracy, was still new in Britain but almost wholly foreign in India. Land ownership in the jungles and clearings of the terai was especially hazy, since this strip of territory, perhaps no more than thirty kilometres wide, had often acted as a buffer zone between rulers from the plains and from the hills. To the Nepalis, borders meant mountain ridges and river courses, not lines on a sheet of paper. Pre-colonial records were extensive, thanks to Mughal bureaucracy, but rather than define specific areas, these records documented territory in terms of lists of villages, with divisions and subdivisions, strips of information like DNA, which over time, also like DNA, mutated under the pressure of local politics and corrupt officials. The result was that patches of land could belong to a parent tax authority that was not contiguous and located many kilometres away. Colonial officials were often bamboozled by these taxation records, which came with no correlate maps and were riddled with inconsistencies and forgeries.

The Mughals had done things their way, and for a while the Company

had adopted their practices, adding to the mountain of Mughal tax records. Yet in Europe accurate maps were transforming the very idea of land ownership, and would shortly do the same in India. From the British perspective, the tax revenues of these villages didn’t mean much; increasingly, the issue was the need for a definitive border. The Company viewed the most logical place for that border as the line of hills that marked the beginning of the Himalaya. Bhimsen Thapa understood that if Gorkha capitulated in the dispute with the British over the twenty-two villages at Butwal, then in due course the Gorkhali regime could lose much of its territory along the Terai, the most productive land it held with which to pay its troops and maintain the regime. It was the very definition of an existential threat.

When Francis Rawdon-Hastings, then the Earl of Moira, arrived in India

in October 1813 as the new governor general, he was determined to resolve this border dispute with Nepal one way or another. When negotiations fizzled out, he prepared a plan of attack, one that would return Ochterlony, now in his late fifties, to the battlefield. The campaign promised to be expensive but since the villages in question were, so far as Moira was concerned, part of Oudh, now Awadh, he had no compunction in getting Oudh’s nominal ruler to pay for it. The Court of Directors in London signed their assent in February 1814, in plenty of time for the autumn fighting season. At the end of May, Gorkhali troops attacked a police post in Butwal, killing eighteen Company men, their chief officer tied to a tree and shot full of arrows. The Earl of Moira had his excuse for war.

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By the time the British attacked, Bimsen Thapa had been the leading political figure in Nepal for almost a decade. Tall and spare, Bhimsen had refined features that hinted at Rajput blood, but his family’s hill-billy status provoked sneers from those more confident of their breeding. Perhaps because of this, Bhimsen proved a ruthless political operator. In 1806, the year Amar Singh first attacked Kangra, Bhimsen had persuaded the king Rana Bahadur to marry Bhimsen’s niece, Tripura Sundari Devi, daughter of his younger brother Nain Singh. Such blatant manoeuvring enraged Rana Bahadur’s half-brother, Sher Bahadur. In an argument at court, he drew his sword and cut the king down. Rana Bahadur’s bodyguard, Bal Singh Kunwar, Nain Singh’s son-in-law, immediately drew his own sword and took revenge on Sher Bahadur: this was the prompt for the bloodletting dubbed the Bhandarkal massacre. It was typical of Bhimsen to use this slaughter as an opportunity, rounding up scores of enemies at court and having them executed for their role in this ‘plot’, their places taken by members of his own clan. Rana Bahadur’s senior queen and his many concubines were forced to commit sati, self-immolating on funeral pyres, their screams drowned out by martial drums.

Tripura Sundari, so quickly married and widowed, was made regent to

the new king, her stepson Girvan Yuddha Bikram, cementing the Thapa clan’s total control of the monarchy. Tripura was herself only twelve years old but she would grow up to be a powerful woman in her own right. The book on women in Nepali politics has yet to be written, but Tripura’s story deserves reassessment: the birth of Nepali literature, in recent decades a vibrant and distinctive voice, is often attributed to Bhanubhakta Acharya, a later nineteenth-century poet who translated the Ramayana, but Tripura Sundari also has a claim. Her personal artistic achievement was a translation of a section of the Mahabharata into Nepali, or Gorkhali as it was then known, in which the Raja Dharma, the ‘path of a king’, elucidates the duty and conduct for a warrior-caste ruler who had grabbed the reins of power and was feeling insecure about his social status. The unexpected death of her stepson Girvan soon after he achieved his majority meant she later had another spell as regent, until her own death from cholera in 1832, aged just thirty-eight. For as long as she lived, the nature of palace politics made Tripura an important ally for Bhimsen: it’s no coincidence that his power began to ebb after her premature death.

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As a ruthless and savvy operator who dominated this period, historians have sometimes assumed Bhimsen was overbearing, that the other bharadar, or nobles, shrank before him. Bhimsen could certainly be brutal, necessarily so given the context in which he sometimes operated. But his great skill was reading people, understanding the hopes and fears of those he relied upon for his position: the various brittle strands of the Shah dynasty, some of them teetering on madness; the other nobles, who were often agitating for his removal; and the army, which dominated the Gorkhali project and had to be kept on side. Bhimsen Thapa had no grand vision for Nepal beyond his own clan’s political survival, but keeping the army focussed and happy implied a rolling programme of expansion: more soldiers meant more land with which to pay them and if that antagonised the British, then so be it. As tension with the British mounted in the spring of 1814, he reassured the teenage king Girvan by drawing to his attention a famous instance of successful resistance against the East India Company by the Maratha in 1805.

The small fort at Bhurtpoor [Bharatpur] was the work of man, yet the English, being worsted before it, desisted from the attempt to conquer it; our hills and fastnesses are formed by the hand of God, and are impregnable. I therefore recommend the prosecution of hostilities. We can make peace afterwards on such terms as may suit our convenience.

In calling for resistance against the British, Bhimsen also pointed to the Gorkhali ‘victory’ over the Chinese, conveniently forgetting how close Nepal had come to a catastrophe only avoided because the Chinese were so far from home. The British were next door: more easily resupplied and reinforced. His attitude seems improbably cavalier for someone with such a reputation for political nous. So how did Bhimsen miscalculate so badly? The view of the first British resident of Kathmandu, William Knox, was that Bhimsen Thapa ‘attributed to fear’ the emollient approach the British had taken with his master Rana Bahadur. The way the British conducted themselves was alien to Bhimsen; for their part British diplomats in the early 1800s were exasperated at the difference in the way their Gorkhali colleagues behaved with them, in contrast to the deference they showed Qing officials, who had no trouble getting Nepal’s cooperation. Nepali ambassadors, or vakil, had a clearer understanding of Chinese intentions from their regular diplomatic missions to pay tribute: hierarchies were clearly signalled in Chinese diplomatic etiquette. They found British manners more opaque and harder to interpret.

Bhimsen had seen the British at first hand when he served as bodyguard

during Rana Bahadur’s period of exile in Benares and regarded them as duplicitous. He had looked on with disgust as the East India Company kept the king dangling with a pension and the promise of support, no more than a useful bargaining chip that they exploited to increase their influence and get access for Knox’s trade mission to Kathmandu. Once installed as resident, and under the terms of the 1801 treaty signed at Danapur, Knox demanded reimbursement for the huge debts Rana Bahadur had run up while in exile. Bhimsen noted the difference between the Company’s image of itself as a model of European progress and moral Christian authority, and its underhanded cynicism: subsidising the exiled king as he subverted his own family’s power before demanding its money back once this was accomplished. Bhimsen knew his country had been played and hated the British for it, a loathing that would burn deep for decades.

Bhimsen had also taken careful note of the Company’s military capability

so when he seized power in 1806 to become Nepal’s first mukhtiyar, or chief minister, he instituted a series of reforms to the Gorkhali military, introducing several organisational features he’d admired in the Bengal army. Even before that, Nepal’s best troops had adopted uniforms in imitation of the Company’s men: red jackets and white cross belts. They were drilled just as the Bengal army was, using English words of command. (This was why the Qing had suspected British involvement in the Gorkhali invasion of Tibet.) French mercenaries had earlier been hired to build up the Gorkhali artillery, casting guns and manufacturing gunpowder. Bhimsen Thapa continued this use of foreign military advisers; he hired British deserters to help train his troops and manufacture muskets. One of them, a man called Byrnes, was still a colonel of artillery in 1814 when war broke out with the East India Company. These British advisers even taught their Gorkhali students some English marching tunes, which they played on their fifes going into battle, much to the astonishment of their British opponents. They learned too from the Chinese, who in 1792 had used lightweight one-pounder artillery pieces made of leather that could be carried on the shoulder of one man: practical in the mountains, even if they burst after a few rounds.

The identity of those Gorkhali troops was also significant, having

important implications for the future of the British in India and beyond. Officers were Khas Chhetris but ordinary soldiers were mostly Magars, along with some Gurungs, from Tibeto-Burmese ethnic backgrounds. They were superb soldiers: muscular, agreeable and without the religious observances that complicated more orthodox Hindu units. By contrast, most of their opponents in the Company’s Bengal army were high-caste men from Awadh. Having grown up in the mountains, the Gorkhali troops had that rugged self-reliance so typical of mountain people, remaining cheerful despite the worst provocations of hunger and exhaustion. These were the men identified in the British imagination as ‘Gurkhas’, misreading what was in effect a political classification for an ethnic one. When the war between them was over, Ochterlony would offer incentives to prise some of these troops into his own service, and when he took Amar Singh’s surrender in 1815, they signed an agreement that any troops in the service of Nepal who wished to join the British forces should be free to do so. This was the starting point for the famous Gurkha regiments that helped shape the British Empire. Some of those recruited by the British were indeed Gorkhali, Magars and Gurungs from regular Nepali regiments, but most were in fact irregular auxiliaries the Gorkhali army recruited in Garhwal and Kumaon to make up numbers.

Bhimsen’s hatred of the British perhaps blinded him to the level of

support he might actually get from beyond his own borders in Nepal’s struggle with the East India Company. The Gorkhali regime, both before and after war with the British, sought common cause with other enemies of the Company, particularly the Maratha confederacy and the Sikh ruler Ranjit Singh, whose military capability was on a par with that of Gorkha. Although the Sikhs had routed the Gorkha army at Kangra, both sides could see advantages in joining forces against the British. But as things worked out, Ranjit’s interest was half-hearted and the war would be lost before he could act. Even more important was the attitude of the Qing, whose air of invincibility had been dented following the so-called White Lotus rebellion, a guerilla insurgency against crippling tax rates. This had cost the life of the Manchu general Fuk’anggan, who had led the invasion of Nepal. The rebellion was overcome but the regime was struggling with deepening corruption and periods of famine. Despite this, when the Chinese insisted that Nepal’s five-yearly embassy visit Beijing, Gorkha’s envoys took the opportunity to press for China’s support. They were advised to live in harmony. Even so, the possibility that the Qing would intervene in the event of an overwhelming defeat of Gorkha was perhaps the most potent brake on the Earl of Moira’s ambitions.

The old warrior Ochterlony was convinced that the most immediate

threat to the British in India was from the Gorkhali army, in particular his adversary Amar Singh Thapa. In 1813, Amar Singh’s troops occupied four villages on the plains of Hindur, the small kingdom that Amar Singh had taken in 1805 during his drive west. The British believed these villages came under their protection, under the terms of a proclamation made in 1809. The governor general wrote to Girvan Yuddha, the Gorkhali king, demanding his troops withdraw. The reply, essentially coming from Bhimsen Thapa, was a history lesson: ‘As the Honourable Company have by the grace of God established their dominion in Hindoostan by the power of the sword, so have I by the same means acquired possession of the hills together with the lowlands dependent on the territories of former Rajahs.’ Even so, ‘in consideration of friendship’, he issued orders to Amar Singh to withdraw.

Ochterlony had already begun gathering intelligence for a possible

campaign in the west, so when Amar Singh, having withdrawn his soldiers from the plains, asked to meet him, he took the opportunity to ‘skirt along the hills, or as near as the roads will admit’, travelling east from the Sutlej river. Their meeting at Kalka was amicable but Amar Singh was still fixated on the fort at Kangra, believing that since the British would have to fight the Sikhs, they should join forces with Gorkha. Kangra was of no concern to the Company, Ochterlony told him. He made careful notes on Gorkhali fortifications, which he admired for their strength and ingenuity, and a map of his journey. He also drew on reports from other officers to produce a shrewd overview of Gorkhali troops in their western provinces, particularly their equipment and ethnic background, observations he reported to the governor general’s office. This intelligence would stand him in good stead.

Provocation for war came not in the west, where Ochterlony would

command a column, but in the east, where negotiations over the status of Butwal were breaking down. This was land that Bhimsen Thapa’s father had acquired when he took Palpa, so the Gorkhalis had been collecting rents there for five years when a proxy for the Company, arguing that the land had belonged to the nawab of Oudh and was consequently his, attempted to seize the villages, killing a Gorkhali official. A commission was set up to look into the entire border issue, but before it convened, the Gorkhalis took more villages, bringing the total to twenty-two. The British commissioner, Captain Paris Bradshaw, issued an ultimatum, demanding the Gorkhalis withdrew.

Girvan Yuddha sought advice from his ministers and generals on the right

course of action. Given what the governor general was proposing – establishing Company authority on the terai – the king posed a simple, rhetorical question: ‘How then is my Raj to exist?’ In that question lay the most persuasive explanation for Gorkha defiance. The economics hadn’t changed. Nepal paid her soldiers through land, specifically through rents, known as jagir. Those who performed long service to the king might be rewarded with a piece of land in perpetuity, a kind of pension called birta. The regime had to grow to meet these commitments. Nepal couldn’t afford to be pushed back from its most profitable gains, cultivated land on the terai, where there was also plenty of virgin jungle available to those with the necessary capital to clear it. To do so would fatally undermine the new nation’s economic model. Gorkha leaders hoped that the virulent form of malaria known as aul that plagued the terai and had decimated the Kinloch expedition would stop the British. They ignored Paris Bradshaw’s ultimatum.

The consequences of war against the British were obvious to the king’s

ministers. The myriad kingdoms across the southern Himalaya that the Gorkhalis had knitted into an empire could splinter again. Such petty states would be at the mercy of the great power to the south, precisely the outcome Prithvi Narayan Shah had feared. The British had the same idea, courting the various local chiefs the Gorkhas had ousted across the Himalaya. David Ochterlony believed these displaced and disgruntled rulers, ‘ingrates’ he judged them, weren’t worth the bother; some local populations were no happier to see their old raja’s return than they were the arrival of the Gorkhas. In the east, the chogyal, or king, of Sikkim offered support to the British in their fight against Gorkha but, as a British official put it, ‘in so doing the most earnest and impressive entreaties were made that they might not be deceived, as the most inevitable destruction would attend them if they were’, These stirrings of rebellion added to a growing anxiety among Gorkhali commanders. Amar Singh Thapa and the Gorkhali governor of Kumaon, Brahma Shah, no friend to each other, put their names to a letter warning of disaster. Both had spent years stamping Gorkhali control on the western provinces and knew how fragile the situation was.

The English, seeing their opportunity, have put themselves into an attitude of offence, and the conflict, if war now be undertaken, will be desperate. They will not rest satisfied without establishing their own power and authority, and will unite with the Hill Rajas, whom we have dispossessed. We have hitherto but hunted deer. If we engage in this war, we must prepare to fight tigers.

Amar Singh betrayed no hint of this concern in a letter he wrote to Ochterlony in the summer of 1814, warning the British that

the troops of the Goorkhas, resembling the waves of the ocean, whose chief employments are war and hostilities, will make the

necessary preparations to prevent the usurpation of any one place.

Ultimately, both sides misread each other’s ‘red lines’. The British failed to understand how a border dispute might be judged an existential threat in Kathmandu and that any consequent war would be prosecuted wholeheartedly. They also misjudged the resilience and courage of the Gorkhali army. Public opinion in India held that the war would be short and that the raja of Nepal would quickly capitulate. The Earl of Moira entertained the idea this might happen before any shots were fired. Bhimsen Thapa, meanwhile, did not believe that the East India Company would mount a serious attack on Nepal. His mistake was failing to appreciate how the diplomatic twists and turns and bellicose posturing his government employed in its border dispute had stoked the Earl of Moira’s own existential fears for the British in India: commercial prudence aside, the governor general could not be seen to vacillate.

The confidence of British officers was inversely proportional to their

experience of Gorkhali military capabilities. The governor general was a bluff old soldier who planned thoroughly, but he didn’t know mountains, concluding blithely that ‘the difficulties of mountain warfare were greater on the defensive side’. He anticipated ‘a brilliant and rapid termination of the war’, conceding only that it needed to be ‘rapid’ because any failure would encourage the Sikhs and Marathas to exploit British vulnerability. Ochterlony had experience of Gorkhali troops and had personally met Amar Singh Thapa in 1813. His first view of the army had also been dismissive, ‘ill-armed and undisciplined barbarians who effect [sic] a wretched imitation of the dress, accoutrements and constitution of a British native battalion’. The closer war came, however, the more he balanced his opinion. Like the general he was about to fight, Ochterlony was becoming increasingly sceptical about his prospects. True, ‘Goorkha power must be completely overthrown to avoid a constant source of trouble and expense,’ but, as he wrote to his friend Charles Metcalfe, the young and capable colonial administrator who had taken over as resident in Delhi:

To set off with the idea of overthrowing a long-established Government, and for such an unprofitable purpose, appears to me the most Quixotic and the most impolitic measure we have ever attempted – setting aside all the physical difficulties.

‘Quixotic’ and at times embarrassing: despite Amar Singh’s respect for the Honourable Company’s soldiery, there would shortly be moments of bloody incompetence.

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The Company’s army, the largest the British had put into the field in India thus far, was in the overall command of an officer of the regular British army rather than a Bengal Infantry man. This in itself created tension among the East India Company’s own officers, demoralised from years of neglect. In the eighteenth century the Company’s army had been the wonder of the colonial world but was now in urgent need of reform. Then there was the officer himself. Robert Rollo Gillespie, like Ochterlony recently promoted to major general, was the epitome of the imperialist adventurer. A hard-drinking gambler, a womaniser who in his youth fought duels, Gillespie was regularly in trouble with authority and always leading the attack. He was famous for his immediate and decisive response to the mutiny of sepoys at Vellore in 1806, the first significant uprising against British command by indigenous troops. The speed and aggression Gillespie had shown in coming to the aid of his fellow countrymen had made him a national hero.

Yet Gillespie’s glory days were now in the past. As preparations were

laid for war in the cooler post-monsoon season of 1814, Gillespie was facing another personal crisis, accused of corruption in his previous posting in Java by the founder of Singapore, Stamford Raffles. Worse, he had suffered head injuries fighting the Dutch and French at Fort Cornelis in Java three years before; the historian John Pemble thought it likely that when he took command against the Gorkhas he was not in his right mind. The diarist Lady Nugent, who spoke regularly with Gillespie when he arrived in India shortly before the Nepal war, believed his ‘natural impetuosity and his extraordinary vanity and love of fame had led him into false ideas and errors that would embitter his future life’. His future life was not long. Gillespie’s rage and impatience when besieging Gorkha troops inside the strategic fort of Nalapani at Khalanga prompted one of his famous charges, and he was shot through the heart by a sniper on 31 October. One witness wrote: ‘General Gillespie was shot dead in the act of huzzaing to the men, waving his hat in his left hand and sword in his right hand; and yet not a man would follow him nor advance with them.’ It was the first significant action of the war and the campaign’s commanding officer was already dead. Many of the officers who served him were relieved. The Gorkhali troops were proving a brave and resolute enemy. Gillespie’s body was preserved in spirits and transported to Calcutta for burial, where the joke was that he had been ‘a pickle when alive, and a preserve when dead’. In Britain, predictably, he was hailed as a glorious hero.

The Nalapani fort held out for another month, a few hundred Gorkhalis

facing thousands of better-equipped troops, benefitting from the determined leadership of Balbhadra Kunwar, Bhimsen Thapa’s nephew, who consequently remains a national hero for at least some in Nepal. Courage and tactical nous were the Gorkhali advantages: disharmony and poor leadership the failings of the British. Both sides had over the course of the previous half-century been aggressively expansionist; both were defending hard-won colonial interests. Balbhadra’s father, like so many of the wider Thapa clan, had been a colonial governor serving in various postings in the west and far west of Nepal’s provinces.

The consequence was, as ever, a pitiful destruction of human life.

Although stoutly defended, Nalapani was small and of mediocre construction: it left its occupants cruelly exposed. When the British captain Henry Sherwood stepped inside its ruins, he bore witness to a pathetic scene: ‘Those who could in any way move had attempted to get out: but others were calling for water, and our officers were assisting, as well as they could, by pouring water out to them.’ The fort’s water supply had been cut, which ultimately had forced its abandonment; Balbhadra had escaped along with as many of his men as could still walk. ‘Some of the poor creatures had lain there for three days with their limbs broken,’ Sherwood continued. ‘I shall never forget one young woman with a broken leg, lying among the dead.’ He saw an injured Gorkha soldier ‘making figures in the bloody dust with his fingers’, out of his mind from a head-wound.

The most affecting sight was two little girls, one about four years old, the other about one. Their father and mother had both been killed. They were both taken care of, but the elder screaming very much, fearing she should be separated from the younger…. This day I saw the horrors of war; and indeed, horrible it is.

The Earl of Moira’s plan for the war split Nepal into two, west and east of the Kali Gandaki, the deep river gorge roughly in the middle of the country. The army was deployed in four columns, two in either theatre. The larger of the two forces in the east was assigned the capture of the fort at Makwanpur, seizing the road to Kathmandu, a killer blow. A smaller force to its left would leave Gorakhpur for the disputed frontier lands of Butwal, drawing Gorkha opposition away from the main column and if the situation allowed capturing Tansen, the capital of the formerly independent state of Palpa, whose governor had been Bhimsen Thapa’s father. He had died in the days leading up to the war and it was his grandson, Bhimsen Thapa’s nephew, Ujir Singh Thapa, who led the Gorkhali defence in this sector. Facing him was Major General John Wood, whose vacillation and uncertainty before a fortification called Jitgadhi sent him back to Gorakhpur under pressure from a jubilant enemy force. When Wood asked that the bodies of the British dead be returned, Ujir Singh told him: ‘Any attempt to commit unjust aggression on this powerful state will be severely punished by its gallant army.’ It was a similar story for the main eastern force: hesitation, delay and a clumsy intervention by the Earl of Moira, who replaced his original commander, the hesitant Major General Bennet Marley, with someone even less incisive.

Of the four columns advancing on Nepal, it was that of the older and less

favoured David Ochterlony, operating in the furthest west of the Gorkhali kingdom that coped best with the tactical demands of mountain warfare. His force, almost entirely native infantry and cavalry with some European artillery, was boosted with Sikh troops from rajas under the Company’s protection, impressive men but unused to disciplined fighting. Given considerable discretion, Ochterlony chose to equip his force with heavy artillery even though the Earl of Moira had envisaged a fast-moving campaign with mobility as the key. Ochterlony was more patient, deciding that the enemy’s reliance on forts justified his slow progress with heavy guns. So it proved. He used elephants to bring his artillery to where it could threaten the first fort at Nalagarh, and the garrison promptly surrendered. Trees were felled and roads cleared to bring these guns to the next objective, Ramgarh, where Amar Singh Thapa waited with the best of his army, behind stockades and well dug in. His troops proved far better and more resilient soldiers than the sepoys Ochterlony commanded. Ochterlony’s masterstroke was to trick Amar Singh into moving his position, from Ramgarh, where he was largely impregnable, to Malaun, where the Gorkhali general had quartered his wife and young son – and his wealth too. As a consequence, the British took both locations, with almost no casualties.

Amar Singh was brave, but a poor tactician. After the death of Gillespie

and the fall of Nalapani, he had told his son Ranjor Singh, commander of the Gorkhali troops in that sector, to withdraw from the superbly fortified town of Nahan in favour of a tiny fortress at Jaithak. The decision baffled Henry Sherwood, who wrote how the Gorkhas ‘at one moment defend themselves well, not only with bravery but with judgement; and at another, neglect the commonest means of defence’. Nevertheless, taking Jaithak proved beyond Gillespie’s successor, Gabriel Martindell. An attempt to storm it cost the British hundreds of casualties in one day, one of the dead being William Makepeace Thackeray’s uncle Thomas, shot in the chest as he tried to withdraw with his men, having formed a square to delay the counter-attacking Nepalis. Only seven men in his command made it back alive. After that reverse, Martindell was poleaxed with indecision.

Two peripheral campaigns proved far more successful. In the east the

British cooperated with the raja of Sikkim to push back the Gorkhas beyond the Mechi river. In the west a hastily concocted force under the command of William Gardner, many of them irregulars, including hundreds of mercenary Pathans from Afghanistan, managed to wrest the small town of Almora from the Gorkhali governor of Kumaon, Brahma Shah. This followed the death of his brother Hasti Dal, a revered and talismanic general, overhauled while trying to secure the Gorkhali lines of communication to the west. (One of the most effective reforms the Gorkhalis had instituted in their new empire was their official hulak postal system that kept Kathmandu apprised of events.) The Gorkhali forces, just like the British, also had to resupply their forces and the fall of Almora effectively cut Nepal off from Garhwal, where Ochterlony was fighting Amar Singh Thapa. A series of surrenders followed, and the dynamic shifted from which side would win to which faction in Kathmandu would emerge in control of a much-reduced Gorkha Empire. Brahma Shah told the British he wanted power returned to more aristocratic hands, dismissing the Thapa clan as Khas upstarts. Yet despite his personal responsibility in this calamity, Bhimsen Thapa would hold on to power.

*

In November 1814, in the early weeks of the war, Major Paris Bradshaw, who had previously been the boundary commissioner negotiating with Kathmandu and was now Major General Bennett Marley’s political agent, was put in charge of concluding a peace treaty with the Gorkhalis. The draft he had made by the end of that month was signed more or less unchanged little more than a year later at Sagauli, on 2 December 1815. Before the war, Gorkha power had been at its zenith, stretching from the Tista river in the east, now in the Indian state of West Bengal, to the Sutlej in the west, in modern Himachal Pradesh. It had truly been a Himalayan empire. After the war, Nepal had lost a third of its territory, including the provinces of Garhwal and Kumaon as well as vast tracts of valuable land in the terai. The new boundaries were the Mahakali river in the west and the Mechi river in the east.

With the Gorkha threat neutralised, Ochterlony and Charles Metcalfe

were already turning their attention to the Sikh Empire and the protection of the Company’s flank east of the Sutlej. Yet even with the treaty agreed, Bhimsen Thapa still tried to wriggle off his hook, refusing to have it ratified, and the Company put Ochterlony in charge of a final – arguably unnecessary – campaign to force the issue, in February 1816 taking the fortress at Makwanpur, just a few days’ march from Kathmandu. Necessary or not, during this interlude between the agreement of terms and the capitulation at Makwanpur, Bhimsen looked for help in his struggle against the British, to Ranjit Singh and other potential enemies in common. He also wrote to the Jiaqing emperor, accusing the East India Company of outrageous provocations and aggression, but the ambans in Lhasa refused to forward his letters to Beijing. Or at least, that’s what they told Bhimsen Thapa.

In fact, the Qing had been paying close attention to events in Nepal.

British success prompted the Jiaqing emperor into sending an army into Tibet. For several months in the summer of 1816, the Earl of Moira and his staff had to consider the threat of China’s intervention. Now began a three-way game of diplomatic poker. China could ill afford another expensive war in order to reassert its control over Nepal, but wanted to maintain its status with Britain. From the British point of view, having just found out how much treasure fighting in the mountains could absorb, and having suffered several uncomfortable reverses, the last thing needed was an escalation of hostilities. There were plenty in Britain who wondered at the sense of fighting the Gorkhalis in the first place, not least the Duke of York, commander-in-chief of the British army, a man who knew a lot about cards and other games of chance. As it was, Bhimsen Thapa, who now held the worst hand, would play best. Knowing Britain was anxious about its relationship with China, he would exploit that apprehension to claw back some of his losses.

Under the terms of Sagauli, the British were entitled to have a diplomat

resident at Kathmandu, and on 17 April 1816, the Gorkhali envoy Gajraj Mishra led the new acting resident, Lieutenant John Peter Boileau, through the streets of Kathmandu to the palace. Born in Dublin of Huguenot stock, Boileau had been stabbed in the thigh during fighting in late 1814 but had recovered to split his assailant’s head in two. Now he was enforcing the governor general’s terms for peace. Led up several flights of narrow stairs to the audience chamber, Boileau found the waiting courtiers framed by curtains of white muslin, shielding them from the hot sun. The king, Girvan Yuddha, now eighteen and in his majority, sat under a canopy suspended from four silver standards, but he rose and stepped down from his dais to greet the officer. Real power lay elsewhere in the room; the man Mishra introduced next was Bhimsen Thapa.

In presenting his credentials, Boileau made it clear that while the

governor general looked forward to a new relationship with Nepal, the first task of the Gorkhali government was to implement the treaty they had just signed. Bhimsen was courteous, even animated, but impossible to read. No promises were made. Around him were the raja’s bharadar, the nobility, all of them wondering, just like Boileau, what the chief minister’s next move might be, none of them with a coherent plan to get rid of him.

The British, first in the shape of Boileau, then followed in late July by his

permanent successor Edward Gardner, were anxious to prevent any confrontation with China. Bhimsen understood this very well, but his relations with the East India Company were only one part of a much more important issue: his own survival. Although he had told China the next British target was Tibet, Bhimsen knew the Qing would quickly conclude the British posed no further threat. Meanwhile, his enemies at court, principally the Pande family, were smarting from the humiliation of a heavy defeat. Acting tough against the British would take the pressure off from both angles, providing a display of strength for the Pandes to consider and a pretext for stoking Chinese anxieties, news of which would chasten the British. So Bhimsen stationed troops to keep watch on the resident and sent Amar Singh Thapa, shortly before the old general’s death, for talks with Qing envoys close to the Tibetan border. Almost immediately, he began feeding information on these overtures to the resident who in turn had a detailed exchange with his masters in Calcutta, who were now contemplating another war with the remnants of the Maratha Empire. In this way, Bhimsen applied pressure on the Company’s most sensitive nerve: China.

Everything now depended on relations with the Qing. If they demanded

it, Gardner was to withdraw. Meanwhile the British hurried to reassure China that Nepal retained its independence and the East India Company had no designs on its territory. The Qing did in fact request Gardner be recalled, but the Earl of Moira, now titled the Marquess of Hastings following the war with Gorkha, finessed this by requesting the Chinese install their own resident, to keep an eye on what the restless Gorkhali army was up to. The Chinese demurred, Gardner stayed put and Bhimsen Thapa could justifiably claim that he had managed to keep Nepal largely independent. His hand was strengthened when the young king died, reportedly in an outbreak of smallpox, in November 1816; as noted earlier, the king’s young son was put in the care of Bhimsen’s niece Tripura Sundari, who began her second term as regent.

The Marquess of Hastings soon realised that in making peace with Nepal,

the East India Company had effectively become tax collector for the raja in Kathmandu: in the terms of Sagauli, the British had agreed to an indemnity, to be paid to the Gorkhali king as compensation for land on the terai seized during the fighting. The governor general now decided to give back this land: the very land and more besides that the British had gone to war over. The Victorian historian Edward Thornton claimed this decision ‘converted the war into an idle but dismal farce’, but given Nepal’s relationship with China, and Britain’s relationship with China, the governor general had little choice. The Company’s limited room for manoeuvre also explains why the resident at Kathmandu fulfilled a very different and more limited role compared to residents stationed in other important locations on the Indian subcontinent: not so much a diplomat or negotiator, but an early-warning system of Gorkhali militarism.

To accommodate their resident, the king of Nepal had given the British a

scrap of land more than three kilometres north of the palace, whose name in Nepali translates as the ‘house of devils’. Plagued by fog in winter and mosquitoes in summer, Edward Gardner followed the governor general’s policy of appeasement towards Nepal to the letter by doing absolutely nothing as politely as possible, a position he maintained for the next thirteen years until Calcutta antagonised him by cutting his salary, at which point he retired. His replacement was the pink-cheeked neophyte Ochterlony had met at Delhi ten years earlier: Brian Houghton Hodgson. His role would be far more active. Through timing, opportunity and inclination, Hodgson would put himself at the centre not only of court politics in Kathmandu, but also what might be termed Himalayan Studies: the region’s ethnography and natural history, and Buddhism, just as Europe discovered it. As we shall see in the next chapter, he also forged relationships that would have a direct bearing on the future of the British Empire.

The impact of détente between Kathmandu and Calcutta on the people of

Nepal was the most dismal consequence of the war. Gorkha’s powerful army had not gone away and was agitating for revenge. There was no question of reforming how they were paid and no real interest on the part of Bhimsen Thapa in doing so. He was a pragmatist, anxious to keep the court and the army on side. His problem was that the same number of fish were now occupying a smaller pond. Senior officers took their salary as grain from farmers and sold it in India for cash, which was repatriated not to where it was earned but to Kathmandu. In this way, the wealth of the land was centralised on Nepal’s capital and the ordinary people of Nepal suffered decades of little or no investment and no escape from a life of desperate toil. The situation was most keenly felt in those areas of modern Nepal, such as the far west, most recently gathered into the Gorkha Empire and regarded largely as spoils of war. These are still among the poorest parts of Nepal.

Over the next century and a half, the deadening hand of distant interests

would hold back the people of the Himalaya. For the most part, assuming they toed a line drawn in Calcutta or Beijing, they were left to their own devices. Abetting this colonial indifference were ruling elites that failed, usually by omission, to develop the material lives of ordinary people. The historian Ludwig Stiller captured Nepal’s stagnant drift in his book The Silent Cry. Prithvi Narayan Shah had believed his new nation walked on two legs, its military and its farmers, and that without a rich peasantry, the country would founder.

Somewhere on the road of conquest, amid the crash of guns and the sweat of battle, these ideals were lost. The military had assumed the right to grow and to live at the expense of the farmers of Nepal, and all too many of the bharadars forgot the meaning of their title (‘those who carry the burden of the nation’) and demanded that the nation serve them.

The picture was different across the border in Kumaon, now under British control. In April 1816, Captain Felix Raper was in its capital Almora, a hundred and sixty kilometres or so west of the new border with Nepal, writing to a friend. Raper had, with permission from the Gorkha governor of Srinagar, explored the source of the Ganges nine years earlier in the company of the Anglo-Indian adventurer Hyder Jung Hearsey. It was a region he knew well. Now he predicted great things for the town, which would become ‘a fashionable resort in the hot weather’. His guess proved correct. Before long the British had built a sanatorium near Almora and the notion of the British hill station was born. Mountain villages barely heard of before the Nepal War became as famous as Calcutta: Mussoorie, close to the fortress of Nalapani where the hot-headed gambler Gillespie perished; the beautiful hamlet of Naini Tal; and Simla, which would become the summer capital of the Raj, immortalised by Rudyard Kipling, hidden in the mountains north of where Amar Singh Thapa had been outfoxed by David Ochterlony. Leaving aside the impact hill stations had on the life of the British up until their departure in 1947, they transformed the economic prospects of the former colonies of Nepal, albeit under British hegemony. Young men from poor villages in Nepal, Kumaon and Garhwal would over time become an integral part of the Indian army, protecting the Raj, a source of wealth and prestige for Britain as it transformed itself, economically and culturally, into the wealthiest nation on earth.

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