Georgian gentlemen, who often raised their mixed-race children with pride, from the Victorians who were much more sniffy about such things. Matters were hardly helped when, in 1792, the Court of Directors of the Honourable East India Company decided to debar mixed-race men from its service. ‘No person, the son of a native Indian,’ ran its decree, ‘shall henceforth be appointed by this court to appointments in the Civil, Military or Marine Services of the company.’ Eventually mixed-race men were allowed to serve as bandsmen or farriers, but while Indians could serve as native officers, with ranks such as jemadar and subadar, combatant military service was closed to sons of the very frequent liaisons between British men and Indian women.
Perhaps the most outstanding mixed-race figure in British India was the aforementioned Lieutenant Colonel James Skinner, born in 1778, who was proud to acknowledge that:
My father was a native of Scotland, in the Company’s service; my mother was a Rajpootree, the daughter of a zamindar … who was taken prisoner at the age of fourteen … My father then an ensign into whose hands she fell, treated her with great kindness, and she bore him six children, three girls and three boys. The former were all married to gentlemen in the Company’s service; my elder brother, David, went to sea; I myself became a soldier, and my younger brother, Robert, followed my example.14
Despite services of which any British officer might have been proud, there were constant difficulties over Skinner’s status, and when he was recommended for the Companionship of the Order of the Bath there were complaints that he did not, strictly speaking, hold a commission, but enjoyed only local rank. One of his many supporters observed that: ‘Out of the numerous individuals in Spain and Portugal to whom brevet commissions have been granted, name one who has done more to serve the state.’15 The Court of Directors ruled in 1829 that:
Lieut-Colonel Skinner, holding from His Majesty the local rank of Lieut-Colonel in India, must necessarily entitle him to all the advantages arising from the possession of his commission; and, consequently, to take rank according to the date of it, with the officers of the King’s and our service … 16
James Skinner and his sons feature in these pages, and it would have been a very rash subordinate who withheld from them the title of sahib. If there are fewer mixed-race sahibs in these pages than there ought to be, you must blame the East India Company, not the author.
Although this is not a history of the Indian army, the story of the British soldier in India is so closely entwined with that of his Indian comrade in arms that I can draw no sharp distinctions: nor would I wish to. Though relations between British and Indian soldiers were never quite the same after the great Mutiny of 1857–58, on either side of this shocking and traumatic episode there were often close and cordial relations between British and Indian soldiers, and a sense of shared endeavour curls across the period like that most pervasive of Indian scents, the smoke from cow-dung fires. A stone in the little Pakistani town of Gilgit – where the Karakoram highway winds down from the Hunza valley and the Chinese border – pays tribute to the memory of Captain Claye Ross of the 14th Sikhs, killed near Korgah on 10 March 1895, and also ‘to that of 45 brave Sikhs who were killed at the same time’. Although the abundant source material enables me to do justice to the British soldiers who served in India, neither the available records nor my own linguistic limitations enable me to write with such confidence about Jack Sepoy.17
First to last there was something wholly distinctive about soldiering in India. To some it became a passion verging on the obsessional, far less to do with big ideas such as ‘Empire’ than a compelling personal involvement in the big bright caravanserai of an army that was entirely sui generis, never more or less than Anglo-Indian. Ensign William Hodson, a clergyman’s son and, unusually for the age, a university graduate, saw the pre-Mutiny army in all its ancient splendour as he moved up to his first battle, Mudki, in December 1845:
I wonder more every day at the ease and magnitude of the arrangements, and the varied and interesting picture continually before our eyes. Soon after 4 a.m. the bugle sounds the reveille and the whole mass is astir at once. The smoke of the evening fires has by this time blown away and everything stands out clear and defined in the bright moonlight. The sepoys bring the straw from their tents and make fires to warm their black faces on all sides and the groups of swarthy redcoats stooping over the blaze with a white background of canvas and the dark clear sky behind all produces a most picturesque effect as one turns out into the cold. The multitude of camels, horses and elephants, in all imaginable groups and positions – the groans and cries of the former as they stoop and kneel for their burdens, the neighing of the hundreds of horses mingling with the shouts of the innumerable servants and their masters’ calls, the bleating of the sheep and goats, and, louder than all, the shrill screams of the Hindoo women, almost bedevil one’s senses as one treads one’s way through the canvas streets and squares to the place where the regiment assembles outside the camp.
Riding forward with his regiment he saw the East India Company’s army looking almost as it might have done nearly a century before:
The stern, determined-looking British footmen, side by side with their tall and swarthy brethren from the Ganges and Jumna – the Hindu, the Mussulman, and the white man, all obeying the same word, and acknowledging the same common tie; next to these a large brigade of guns, with a mixture of all colours and creeds; then more regiments of foot, the whole closed up by the regiments of native cavalry; the quiet looking and English dressed troopers strangely contrasting with the wild Irregulars in all the fanciful un-uniformity of their costume; yet these last are the men I fancy for service.18
It was a prophetic comment, for Hodson – brave, hard as nails and deeply controversial – was eventually to raise his own irregular cavalry regiment, Hodson’s Horse, which left a bloody track behind it during the Mutiny. ‘I never let my men take any prisoners,’ he wrote, ‘but shoot them at once.’ In one sense he represented ‘that side of themselves which the British in India preferred not to see’. He was mortally wounded at Lucknow in March 1858 and was buried there in the grounds of the La Martinière school.19 His tombstone bore the words: ‘Here lies all that could die of William Stephen Raikes Hodson.’ For all his reputation as a looter, when his effects were auctioned, as was the custom, by his comrades, they fetched only £170, and his much-loved widow Susan was spared poverty only because the Secretary of State for India gave her a special grant. His regiment later formed the 9th and 10th Bengal Lancers, and survives to this day in the Indian army, an example of a thread of continuity that was often twisted but never broken.20
It is impossible to think of the British in India without paladins such as Hodson, John Nicholson, Henry Lawrence and Herbert Edwardes. But they were always in a minority, even amongst British soldiers. Far more of the protagonists in British India never held the Company’s, King’s or Queen’s commission, and many, like Private George Smith, who served in India in the 1870s, had their own very distinctive views of the country and its people.
In India’s clime, ‘midst dust and boiling heat,
Where swaddies are tumbled with their sweaty feet,
The land of pumpkins, melons and bananas,
Where soldiers’ pay is reckoned up by annas,
Where people of their clothes cannot much brag,
But walk out gaily in a clean arse
