experienced the dangers and disadvantages of the station. It is ruination to a lad’s pockets, ruination to his principles, and ruination to his health; and I can only conclude the subject by saying that I think their being allowed to remain at the Presidency longer than is absolutely necessary, is a gross injustice to them. There is nothing like up-country and strict drill discipline, in my opinion.67
Bombay was the oldest of the presidencies, for it had become British as part of the dowry of Charles II’s Queen, Catherine of Braganza; its name (now officially replaced by Mumbai) stems from the Portuguese Bom Baia, meaning good bay. Although it had an excellent natural harbour it was not well placed for the China trade, and its hinterland was dominated by the fierce Marathas and scorched by repeated war. The Hindu inhabitants were warlike: some Maratha women still wear their saris caught up between their legs to reflect the days when they might fight alongside their menfolk. John Shipp fought the Marathas, and wrote that: ‘Their wives are excellent horse-women, many of them good with sword and matchlock. They are mounted on the best horses, and it is not unusual for them to carry one child in front and one behind while riding at full speed.’68
In 1825 Bombay was dismissed as ‘of little importance to the [East India] Company’: trade with the hinterland had only begun to be feasible with the end of the Second Maratha War in 1805 and the city lacked a natural corridor in the way that Calcutta was served by the Ganges valley. But by the 1840s the picture had begun to change. The gradual replacement of the Cape route by steam travel from Suez made Bombay the preferred port of entry, and with the development of railways internal travel was made quicker and more reliable. James Williams landed there in late 1859, and told his cousin that it was ‘the most awful place imaginable’, complaining:
We are likely to be in Bombay for some time – it is the worst station in India – nothing on earth to do save die – the voyage here was very long 129 days. There was a good deal of quarrelling that helped pass the time.
He was soon posted to a cantonment on the outskirts of Calcutta, which was altogether better he felt: ‘Calcutta is a charming place compared with Bombay. The houses are large, two-storied and comfortable. The only bother is the distance and the road we have to go over before reaching town.’69
Bombay was the starting point for operations into Sind, and so became increasingly important in military as well as commercial terms. In 1839 a flotilla from Bombay, with HMS Wellesley, HMS Algerine, the Honourable Company’s Ship Constance and the transport Hannah, conveyed a small force including HM’s 40th Foot. The garrison of Karachi quickly fled after Wellesley ‘opened her broadside on the fort with admirable precision’ and then, as Lieutenant Martin Neill of the 40th recalled:
The Admiral and Brigadier landed in the evening to inspect the scene of their triumph after which they returned, accompanied by [Lieutenant] Colonel Powell [commanding officer of the 40th] to enjoy a comfortable dinner, while we small fry amused ourselves planting picquets.70
Soldiers bound for the garrison at Karachi faced a protracted journey. Steamers from Bombay anchored a mile offshore and passengers had to land from shallow-draught boats: it was another mile by carriage to Karachi itself. There was not much to Karachi even when you arrived, and a generous assessment of the Sind Club in 1890 suggested that although its denizens ‘“swear” by their whisky … by constantly using the same spirit without any change, the palate loses to a great extent its power of appreciation’. It would not be until the First World War, when the Mesopotamia campaign greatly increased the traffic through the port, that Karachi would really come of age.
By the 1880s Bombay was the base for one of the two lines of communication running up to the North-West Frontier. One followed the line of the Grand Trunk Road from Calcutta to Lucknow and Peshawar, and the other ran from Bombay to Mhow and Quetta. Many battle-wounded soldiers bound for Britain came through Bombay, and on the railway north-east of the city were the barracks and military hospital at Deolali. The latter was the last leg in the evacuation of men whose nerves had given way under the influence of drink, climate and danger, and the nervous tics of its patients gave rise to the expression ‘doolally tap’. Private Frank Richards observed that Deolali was the depot where British soldiers whose enlistment terms had expired awaited a troopship home (the ‘trooping season’ then ran from October to March):
The time-expired men at Deolalie had no arms or equipment; they showed kit now and again and occasionally went on a route-march, but time hung heavily on their hands and in some cases men who had been exemplary soldiers got into serious trouble and were awarded terms of imprisonment before they were sent home.
The practice of holding men at Deolali was abolished while Richards was in India, and thereafter they went straight to ports of embarkation. 71
It was Bombay’s importance as India’s chief military port that led to construction of the symbolic Gateway to India that looks eastwards across the harbour. Planned to celebrate the accession of George V as King Emperor, it was designed, in Anglo-Saracenic style, by George Wittet: its final plans were accepted in that momentous month, August 1914. Its symbolism would continue until the very end of the Raj with the last British unit to leave India, 1st Battalion the Somerset Light Infantry (the old HM’s 13th Light Infantry of Jelalabad fame), departing from the gateway on 28 February 1948.
B EHIND THE MAJOR PORTS lay the expanse of India, the mofussil, the vast and varied world of districts, country stations and cantonments. To a citizen of Calcutta the mofussil was anywhere in Bengal apart from his own city. But to an inhabitant of a sudder or chief station, the mofussil was the rural localities of his own area. Thus to an inhabitant of Benares, the mofussil was anywhere out of the city and station of Benares.72 In most colonial slang there was a term that meant the same: the bled in French North Africa or the ulu in Malaya: the great unseen hinterland, shimmering or steaming behind the coast. The soldiers who arrived at Calcutta, Madras and Bombay set off into this by river boat, rail or, for the first century of British rule, simply on their feet. Regiments, British and Indian, crawled across the mofussil in marching columns like a great torrent of soldier ants. There was no clear break between the great martial caravanserais of old princely India and the armies of the Raj. Assistant Surgeon John Dunlop watched a British army on the move in 1848, but we might almost subtract a century or two.
The usual calculation is that for every fighting man in the high-caste Bengal army there are five servants or noncombatants: and in a Bombay force, where the caste is generally lower, there are about three camp followers to every fighting man. Consequently, at the lowest calculation, the two divisions moving towards Mooltan, numbered in all nearly 20,000 human beings; with from twelve to fifteen thousand camels, besides elephants, horses, mules and bullocks. The procession usually formed by this enormous cortege, is thus described by Lieutenant Colonel Burlton … :
First comes a bevy of elephants, noble-looking animals, laden with the tents of the European soldiers; then follow long strings of government camels, carrying the spare ammunition and the tents of the native troops. Then again, we have more government camels carrying hospital stores, wines, medicines, quilts, beds, pots and pans of all sorts and sizes. Imagine, for a moment, a county infirmary, or rather its contents live and dead, stock, furniture and stores, to be removed daily, some ten, twelve or fifteen miles on the backs of camels, and you will have some faint idea of this very small portion of our baggage …
Another
