Abstract
This book contains much more than a description of the role of Indian sepoys, both from north India and from the Presidency of Madras, sent from India to participate in British wars in Ceylon, Southeast Asia, Egypt and Mauritius. It also gives the results of the author’s painstaking searches to unravel the secrets of the expeditions’ costs and to quantify the frequent British failures to refund the East India Company for its military contributions to wars that could hardly be considered to be in India’s interest. In addition, attention is paid to the sepoys ‘political’ attitudes, including their resistance to service abroad, as well as to the conditions of their service, such as health care, rations given, punishment, education, pensions and racial relations in the colonial army. Much of this goes beyond the mere history of the sepoys’ overseas service.
The volume under review represents the first part of a project of Dr Bandyopadhyay’s that covers the role of Indian soldiers in all overseas wars between 1762 and 1900. This first part deals with the expeditions to Manila of 1762–66, to Ceylon and the spice islands (now in Eastern Indonesia) in 1779–81 and again in 1784–97, to Egypt in 1801–02, to Mauritius and Java in 1810–12, and—the most massive attack of all—to Burma in 1824–26. All these campaigns except the war on Burma were forced upon the Company by the War Office in London and were part of British armed conflicts that had their centre on the continent of Europe. They caused great human suffering. The Manila expedition, a military success that culminated in the massive plunder of the city of that name, ended five years later with only a third of the men returning home, the others having perished from hunger and disease (p. 277). For all these years, the authorities had neglected to make available transport and the sepoys were left languishing in their barracks. Similarly, in spite of promises to the sepoys that their service would be of three years duration, those sent to the Eastern archipelago in 1794 began to embark for home only in 1801.
Yet, open discontent was rare. In 1812, a rather clumsily planned rising in Java was nipped in the bud. Until 1824, resistance to depart on service overseas was equally feeble. In that year, however, serious protest was voiced—and cruelly suppressed—in Barrackpore near Calcutta. Some years ago, the author published a monograph on this event (Tulsi Leaves and Ganges Water: Slogan of the First Sepoy Mutiny at Barrackpore, 1824, Kolkata, 2003). In this and in other protests, Bandyopadhyay discerns, though more in the north Indian sepoys than in the Madrasis, not only a consciousness of their ‘basic rights and self dignity as professional soldiers’, but also of their unique cultural heritage and ‘their distinct Indian identity’. It was in Java, he submits, that the Bengal sepoy first struck on the idea of an ‘Indian national identity irrespective of caste and religion’, though he is so careful as to suggest that the memory of similar feelings among the Madrasi mutineers at Vellore in 1806 may have contributed to such sentiments. Interesting is his suggestion, that the intimate relations between the sepoys and members of the Javanese nobility in the Surakarta keraton, who were as colonized as they were and as proud of their Indic heritage, helped in making both of them culturally more confident and defiant (pp. 177, 221, 337). Anyway, at this stage, the Indian sepoy was no longer a mere mercenary. Throughout the book, the author suggests, implicitly and explicitly, that the historiography of the Indian sepoy during this period is part India’s proto-nationalist past, and that the sepoy’s protests and insubordination were not just matters of military indiscipline; they belong at least as much to the history of Indian resistance against colonial rule.
Though there is some traditional battle history contained in the volume, the focus is on the sepoy and on the human tragedy of his service abroad, especially during the Burma campaign in which some 20,000 sepoys were involved. Wherever possible figures, often in tables, are given of the numbers of troops involved, of their transportation on board ship, their pay and batta and their personal luggage, of mutineers court-martialed, military provisions, daily and weekly rations for Hindu and Muslim soldiers, distances marched per day, the occurrence of several diseases, prize money (and the scandalously unequal shares of it conceded to the common soldier), and more particularly, the cost of the several expeditions to the Indian tax payer.
Towards the end of the book (p. 348), the total expenditure of the expeditions dealt with is calculated at £10.61 million (without unpaid interest). This final table, however, should have been much more detailed. Earlier (p. 103) the Company’s total expenditure on the overseas expeditions of the 1794 to 1803 period only is given at £8.57 million (inclusive of interest), of which only £3.11 million was paid by the London Exchequer. Until the end of its existence, the Company fought, often with little success, with the UK government for the full payment of sums advanced. The London treasury was wont to argue, by way of excuse, that the Company had gained trading advantages from the victories gained by British arms. There seems to have been little truth in this and, except in the case of the Burma War, all the expeditions had been forced upon the Company by the government at home. Anyway, the author has unearthed much concrete financial information of a kind the historian is in much need of. A really dependable analysis of all financial aspects of early colonial rule has been so far beyond the grasp of the ordinary researcher and the military part of such an analysis must be regarded as perhaps the most difficult to execute. Therefore, though the job seems to be incomplete, Bandyopadhyay has done the historical profession a great service with this study.
It is a pity the proofs were not corrected more carefully. As it is, we now have ‘Witteroreeden’ instead of ‘Weltevreden’ (p. 130), ‘Hemanghubauam’ instead of ‘Hamengkubuwono’ (p. 146), and a quote from Philip Mason that is garbled to the point of incomprehensibility (p. 341), to give only a few examples. Some terms should have been explained, for instance Coffrees/Coffreys (pp. 32, 36) for kāfir/caffer, and Pacauli (p. 47) for pakhālī/water-carrier. And, if I may, as a Dutchman, Chinsura was not Danish (pp. 106, 109), but a Dutch factory.