"People at home thought it was all play and no work. Actually we
did much more work than most people at home."
- Colonel John Hainsworth
|
Running Your Little Empire
Interviews
Working Lives
Fergus Innes:
I went out to this remote district -- it wasn't so very far from Delhi,
actually. It had a very old fashioned district commissioner, and we lived
just as they'd lived any time in the last hundred years. We didn't even
have ice, because he kept eight horses in his stable and he said, "By not
sending for ice from Delhi, I can afford to keep another horse." We didn't
have electricity, so we had the old-fashioned flapping punkahs, and the
food was absolutely intolerable. It was quite rough.
And I certainly shan't forget my first hot weather. The
hot weathers in the north of India were really blistering. And of course
later on, after World War II, gradually air conditioners came in and the
whole standard of comfort for the European in India completely changed.
But the very hot weathers really were absolutely grilling. And you did
your normal day's work. There were some districts where they had this
arrangement of going in at the crack of dawn and then knocking off for a
siesta for three hours in the middle of the day, but I never did that. I
started at the normal time and worked through. By about four o'clock you
were nearly dropping with fatigue.
You started as a Third Class Magistrate. You tried very
small petty cases, and you spent a lot of time learning the language and
the law. And your Deputy Commissioner would take you round with him on
tour. The Deputy Commissioner was supposed to try and see as much of his
district as possible by showing the flag, being the man on the spot, the
man on a horse who'd talk to people, talk to the headman, look at
things -- a certain amount of inspection of police stations, inspection of
schools, looking at any kind of agricultural improvements being carried
out, hospitals -- but mainly talking to the people. A wonderful experience
for a young man to be taken around like that, picking up as much as you
could.
There wasn't really a tremendous amount of court
work -- just petty cases. Then after six months you passed a language exam
and then you became a Second Class Magistrate, or even a First Class
Magistrate after about a year. And then the next step normally was you got
a subdivision when you were really a very young man, with only perhaps a
year or two years' service. A subdivision was a part of a district where
you were a sort of miniature Deputy Commissioner -- that is, district
officer -- subject of course to your Deputy Commissioner. But within your
area, which might be a couple of tahsils -- a tahsil is a revenue
district -- you'd have various small towns or municipalities, which were
very badly run and you had to try and keep them in order to some extent,
see that there wasn't too much corruption and so on. You did that for
perhaps the next four or five years.
And then in my time promotion was very rapid. Twenty years
before it had been so slow that you didn't become a Deputy Commissioner
until you'd got about eighteen years' service. In my time, owing to the
war, World War I, there hadn't been as much recruitment, and you got your
first district when you'd only got about seven years' service. And there
you were, out on your own, total responsibility. And the nice thing about
it was, the Chief Secretary, the secretariat back at headquarters, they
didn't bother you, you didn't bother them. As much as possible they left
you to get on with it. Certainly this was the case in the Punjab. In the
Punjab we had the tradition started by the Lawrences, Sir Henry and Sir
John, who started the first Punjab administration. Sir Henry used to say
to his young men -- he'd send them out to some remote district and he'd say,
"Now go out, settle the district, see that there are no rows." And you
would get on with it. I went out to the Jhelum district in the Punjab in
1932 as Deputy Commissioner, and that was a district of three thousand
square miles, with about a million inhabitants. And that was a small
district. It was a wonderful district in many ways, because it was almost
free from political troubles. Generally speaking, my district was one
where you could really do a bit of old-fashioned administration, not
merely keeping the peace, doing the revenue administration, and doing all
the development work. But I wasn't bothered with much else, so I could
give far more time to the old fashioned type of touring and attending to
development, trying to bring in better agricultural methods, better seed,
reforestation, prevention of erosion. All these things were very much
things a Deputy Commissioner could do if he had the time. And I could make
the time, but there was so much to do in a district in India that one
really never stopped working. It really was a very, very hard life in a
way. It wasn't too nice for your wife, because you didn't see much of her.
I used to work every evening, after dinner and right up to about eleven
o'clock when I was too tired to do any more. And I'd start again at seven
o'clock the next morning, always knock off a bit at four or five o'clock
in the evening to play a game of tennis or go for a ride or something like
that, then start working again. And that's the way it went on.
The only relief really was your touring, because when you
were riding round, you had these fellows riding beside you and you were
talking to them the whole time, but that was fun. That was nice. And you
were out in the fresh air. The headmen of the villages, you used to have
about twenty people riding along with you, humeh rakab, as they used to
say, that is, "stirrup to stirrup." You'd call them up one by one. You'd
have a couple of chaps and you'd say, "Right. Now you come along and ride
with me and tell me what's going on here." And you'd discuss all the
things in that particular area of the district. And of course they'd talk
far more freely. You couldn't talk to them in an office or a court room
like you could out there. That was the real joy of it. That's how you'd
find out what was going on in the district. I used to do a fortnight on
tour in every month in the cold weather, and a bit less in the hot
weather.
Philip Mason:
I had three years at the Defense Department, and I made friends
with a lot of soldiers and liked them very much, and I became very good
at dealing with generals, I thought. I used to call them Sir and be very
polite to them. And then, at the end of that time, they said would I like
to stay on with the Government of India, and I said, "No, thank you very
much, nice to be asked but I really want to go back and have charge of a
district." I
thought this was an essential part of one's life.
And then I went off to Garwahl in November of 1936, which
I reckoned was the best job in India, because in Garwahl you had no roads,
no railways. There were telegraphs, but you weren't very near them,
fortunately, so you were really on your own. Even in normal times you've
got a great deal of camping going on most of the time. We were making
maps, cultivation maps for the whole district, showing every field, and
who owned every field. This meant I got an extra three months
camping -- nine months camping every year. This meant that I was practically
always in camp, moving around, in tents. And really, if you like walking
in the mountains, as we did, it was an ideal existence. You could always
say in answer to practically any letter the Government sent you, "Owing to
the poor state of communications in this district, your letter arrived too
late to do anything about it." And you could really do almost
anything -- within reason.
And I liked the people very, very much indeed. I was
really very fond of them. They always believed you could put their trouble
right, whatever it was. We were marching every day in the district,
fifteen or twenty miles a day, and all the way along the road you would
have people coming up and saying, "Come and look at my field, put this
right for me, do this, or do that for me." Sometimes you found a case had
gone right up to the High Court and had been decided wrong all the way up,
because nobody had been to look at the thing and seen it on the spot. We
made a complete record of every field throughout the whole district. It
was twenty-one days' march from one end of the district to the other, five
thousand square miles. That was quite a lot of ground to cover.
H.P. Hall:
India was administered in quite a different way from other parts
of the Empire in that the European element was very thin on the ground.
And when I was operating in the Indian Political Service, and in Meerut,
for example, with the Indian Civil Service, all my subordinates were all
Indians, and therefore I had to work through them. And when I was in
Nasirabad, on the borders of Sind and Baluchistan, the only cases I tried
were murder cases, land cases, or water cases. It was an irrigated area,
and stealing water could lead to a lot of problems. But my staff, which
were all Indians, Extra Assistant Commissioner, Tahsildar and Niab
Tahsildar, dealt with all the burglary or small cases. I only dealt with
the serious cases. And I had the authority to sentence people up to
sixteen years, for murder. And I used to try several murder cases a month,
under tribal law.
But the other thing we had to do was to assess revenue.
You assessed it physically. You looked at a crop, and the Government's
share of that was ten per cent, and you said the yield of this field is so
many maunds, which is the unit of weight you used. Eighty pounds, I think
a maund is. And if there was a dispute about it, then you roped off a
small area and you actually harvested the crop and weighed it, and that
was the way you took the final decision. But surprisingly, after a certain
amount of practice, you could look at a field of wheat or rice or millet,
the three main crops, and you could form a fairly accurate assessment of
what the yield would be. And then as I became Director of Food and Civil
Supplies, we set up a collecting point to buy all the food, and we
deliberately tried to cut out the banias, the moneylenders. So when I
bought the food grain from the zemindars, the growers, I paid them, not
their agents. They were paid personally, so if they wanted to repay their
loans, it was up to them, but the banias didn't collect it. And as I said,
I fixed a buying price, and then we sold them on ration at the selling
price.
But the other thing we did was we used the opportunity to
improve the yields. We got some good strains of wheat, or rice for that
matter, and gave them to selected growers, zemindars, and then you bought
the crops back from them at a premium, and you stored that specially,
separately, and then you redistributed it. And by using nationalized
industry, using that government authority, in a very short time you could
improve the output quite considerably by distributing fairly widely. And
it wasn't done all that scientifically, but it improved the yield. And I
introduced potatoes and things like that. We were responsible for
everything -- this was one of the advantages. You were responsible for law
and order, for collecting of revenue, for education, for agriculture, the
whole damned lot. You were the chap running your little empire.
H.P. Hall:
I lived in Jacobabad, and when I used to go on tour, I used to
drive over very early in the morning to my office at Jhatpat and collect
any mail or anything that was going on, then get into my car and drive
off, and I'd spend several days out in the blue -- desert country there. And
this driver of mine had a habit of going down to the local coffee shop,
which was about fifty yards down from my office. And often I used to come
out of my office raring to go before the sun got too hot. And I'd have to
wait a few minutes for my driver -- five minutes or so while they went and
collected him out of the coffee shop. And one day I went out there and he
wasn't there, and I was only going off to another place and it was an easy
drive, so I decided I'd go without him. So I said, "Oh! I can't be
bothered to wait for him." And the chap said to me, "What'll you do to
him?" And I said, "Oh, lock him up." And when I came back three days later
to Jhatpat, they said, "What shall we do with your driver?" And I said,
"Well, what about him?" They said, "He's in jail." And they'd locked him
up for three days. Now this is where things can be taken literally. The
jailer happened to be there when I made this comment, and they went and
picked him up. And I might tell you he was never late after that.
Robin Adair:
Very shortly after I got to Araria as a subdivisional officer
there was communal trouble. By communal trouble of course what we meant in
India was trouble between the Hindu and the Muslim. In Araria subdivision
there was quite a considerable minority of the Muslims. The majority was
Hindu but you had pockets of Muslims. Often in one village there would be
intermingled perhaps a dozen or so Muslim families and three or four dozen
Hindu families. The trouble was that both of these communities were very
intransigent about their religious affairs. One of the difficult
situations which was endemic, always cropping up, was when you had a
Muslim festival such as Bakari 'Id. Bakari 'Id is a festival at which the
Muslims have to sacrifice some animal, preferably a cow or a bullock. The
reason that they prefer to sacrifice a cow or bullock rather than a goat
is that the cow or the bullock confers seven times as much religious merit
as does the sacrifice of a goat and it doesn't cost seven times as much.
The cow of course is sacred to the Hindus, so the sacrifice of any form of
cattle was absolutely anathema to Hindus and this is the crux of the
matter that starts trouble brewing.
Now in this particular village, Jumla, Bakari 'Id was due
and I got information from my police thana -- police station -- in the area
that there was serious trouble brewing, so I had to go along there. I
interviewed the Muslim side and got the point of view that they had to
sacrifice some animal on this particular occasion. This was one of their
religious facts that just had to be done, the sacrifice of a bullock
brought seven times as much merit as the sacrifice of a goat and it only
cost about two or three times as much, so there was no other way of doing
it. I tried to persuade them to sacrifice two or three goats instead of
the one bullock. They said, "Well, if you can get a camel for us, that
would be splendid because a camel confers seven times more merit than a
bullock does." But of course in northwest India it would be easy enough to
get hold of a camel, but in Bengal camels were just not available and to
get a camel over from the northwest wouldn't be feasible in the time, so
that one was a non-starter. It was quite interesting, really, the
discussion that one had. They were quite ready to consider propositions
like this, but it always came back in the end to, we're afraid it just has
to be the bullock.
Well, I did my best to persuade them not to sacrifice a
bullock. I was camping in the area. I brought my tents and was camping in
the area at the time to see this thing through. On the morning of Bakari
'Id I got a lorry load of armed police there, about half a dozen to
control the situation. That's about all I had, whereas the Hindu
surrounding villages numbered in the thousands, you see. Well, sure
enough, about four a.m. on the morning of Bakar 'Id we got information
through the police that in fact they had slaughtered this bullock and so
trouble was definitely on. Well, trouble was on because the surrounding
Hindus had already got wind of this and they began to gather in their
thousands. Literally we had a confrontation of something like three
thousand very irate Hindu villagers brandishing their lathis and generally
being pretty arrogant and very, very angry, ready to do battle with these
Muslims who had slaughtered the bullock. Pretty well all day starting at
about five a.m. these eight or ten policemen and I were arguing with them
that this is a fait accompli now. The bullock had been killed. We'd do our
best next year to see it didn't happen but this was done now and there was
no point in creating further trouble. And of course I was parlaying with
the leader. I went forward to talk to them but it was really almost like a
field of battle. You had this mob of about three or four thousand Hindus
ready to attack the Muslim village where this terrible act had been
perpetrated, the slaughter of the cow. It went on pretty well all day
long. We had nothing to eat all day, we were out in the grueling sun, and
finally it got to the stage where I had to order the police to load up and
aim at the leaders of the mob. We got to this stage and then the mob
decided enough was enough. Before any shots had been fired they agreed to
call the thing off.
Stephen Hatch-Barnwell:
Touring was something rather special. One toured in great state.
When I was on survey I went out with two horses, an elephant and three
bullock carts full of luggage. We'd sleep in tents. A whole retinue of
servants. Every day you'd leave camp round about just after breakfast and
you'd rejoin your tents in the next camping site and find the tents set
up, everything there. If you were there for tea, your tea was there. If
you were late, the bearer would appear with whiskey and soda.
Robin Adair:
Now most of one's time one spent on tour. When one went on tour
usually you camped. You took your tent. In India in those days the tents
were really quite luxurious. A tent would be almost the size of a large
room. You'd have hanging partitions and a little bathroom. As far as
amenities went there was very little difference from the kind of bathroom
you had at home. You had a tin tub that the bearer would fill with buckets
of warm water. Camping really was quite civilized. One had all the
amenities as soon as one arrived at a site and the tents were put up. Of
course there would be separate tents for the servants. You'd have a
regular little encampment. The sahib's tent would be quite a large and
luxurious affair. All these carpets put down, all brought along by the
entourage, sometimes by elephants, sometimes by horses. One frequently
actually held court at one's camp. Furniture would be brought as well,
tables and chairs and so on, so one had at camp all the amenities that one
had at home. One spent quite a lot of one's time out in the open air. Most
of one's touring was done in the cold weather, which is the ideal weather
of the Indian subcontinent because it's bright sunshine, quite warm in the
day, quite cold at night.
As a subdivisional officer you were literally in charge of
the administration of the area. Practically everything: you're chairman of
this, chairman of the school board, chairman of almost everything that
there is in addition to having magisterial work. You hear the evidence all
day long in court and then you've got to write up your judgments in the
evening. A pretty strenuous existence really. Then of course you do a lot
of touring. I bought myself a horse fairly early on. They imported a
number of walers from Australia, and they prevailed upon all of us young
civilians to buy these horses, which was a very good thing of course
because it gave us much more opportunity to get around the country,
because you couldn't go by car to most of the places. You had to tour
about the whole of your subdivision to keep contact with everything that
was going on apart from dealing with specific cases such as land disputes,
or someone being knocked over the head with a lathi. All sorts of things
would arise and you'd have to get around. You'd always take your food with
you. We had what we called a tiffin carrier, sort of tiers of little
containers. You'd have your soup in one and your chicken or whatever it is
in the next one, your vegetables in one, your pudding in another one.
It was strenuous but a highly interesting life. You felt
you were doing a really worthwhile job. The administrator in those days,
well, they used to call him mabap, which means Mother-father, that you
were the mother and father of these villagers. A good district officer
could make a tremendous difference to the life of the inhabitants of the
area that he worked for. Not so much by what he did himself but in
instigating others to do things, encouraging, for instance, small
irrigation projects, having wells sunk to get extra water for the
villagers. If you were really keen and interested you would get other
people because the district magistrate was considered such a big shot that
people fell all over themselves to do what he wanted them to do. He
carried a lot of influence in that way. He was a tremendous power for good
or evil.
Fergus Innes:
There was a much better subject, a very brilliant young man. I
don't see why I shouldn't give you his name even. This was Penderel Moon
who was a fellow of All Souls, now Sir Penderel. He came out about four
years Junior to me and he was an absolute rebel, an absolute rebel, and
yet the most marvelous deputy officer. Now when he was a very junior
subdivisional officer, he was trying the most notorious bad man, who
always got off one way or another. And it was quite obvious that Penderel
had got him pegged. The police had actually managed to collect some people
who would give evidence against him in his latest murder. Penderel was
trying this case, and the man then petitioned the High Court for the case
to be transferred to another court, because he said he quite obviously
wasn't going to get fair treatment. The High Court then sent a telegram
down to Penderel Moon saying, "Stay proceedings." The case was going to be
transferred to another court. And a pleader came and planked that down,
"There, sahib, the High Court has ordered stay of proceedings." Penderel
took one look at it, threw it aside, and went on and tried the case, took
it to its conclusion. And my word, a rocket came down from High Court. And
Penderel replied, "I thought it was a bogus telegram." And it might have
been. It could easily have been forged, after all.
And I remember another very nice story about the same man.
Now this subdivision where this occurred was in my district of Jhelum.
Later Penderel Moon was transferred as Deputy Commissioner of Multan, a
very big district. In this subdivision there were two poor peasants who
were in debt to a money lender. There's nothing uncommon in that. But the
money lender had a clever idea that he'd put a bit of pressure on them to
pay up by bringing a false case against them, a criminal case. Too easy.
He got some fellow Hindu friend to accuse them of beating him up. He
maintained that they'd been on a visit to Multan, and they'd beat him up
there. Now the point about this was, even if you couldn't prove it, it
didn't matter, because these fellows were going to have all the trouble of
traveling from Jhelum to Multan, about eighty miles, very expensive for
two poor fellows, to answer a charge about which they knew nothing, and
they'd be put to a lot of expense and a lot of trouble, and probably the
case would be postponed -- you could always get a case postponed for some
thing or other -- so they might have made three trips before they even found
out what the charge was. They didn't know what to do. They'd never heard
of this man. They'd never beaten anybody up in Multan. So then they
thought, "Ah! Moon sahib has gone to Multan," you know, as Deputy
Commissioner. "We will go to Moon sahib." They went down to Moon.
Now Moon was a man who kept open house, any time of the
day or night. He was a bachelor. Any time of the day or night, anybody who
had a cry of complaint, a petition, could come see him. I don't know how
he did it, but he did. They arrived that evening, went straight to the
Deputy Commissioner's house, and said they wanted to see Moon sahib. They
were at once shown in, because his orderlies had orders that they'd got to
show anyone in. Moon heard their story. They said, "Sahib, we don't know
who this man is. He's brought a case, says we've been to Multan and beaten
him up." So he said, "Well, right. Come down to the courtroom tomorrow
morning, mingle in the crowd, and don't show yourself or do anything but
just mingle in the crowd until I call you personally."
And he went down next morning, Penderel Moon, and he got
hold of this petty little third class case from the court of some Third
Class Magistrate, transferred it to his own court, and then sent out his
orderly to call up the complainant. The complainant came up, and Moon
says, "Ah, so these two men came and beat you up did they? All right, come
out into the courtyard and identify these two." And he said, "No! No!"
because he'd never seen them, and he realized the game was up. And Moon
then and there on the spot fined him two hundred rupees for false
complaint, called up the two chaps, and handed them each a hundred rupees.
Well that was what we liked to call British justice. That was a lovely
story.
Brigadier Richard Gardiner:
1934 it was, January 15th I think it was, in Calcutta. I was still
secretary to the Agent there and I'd had lunch, an office lunch in a
public restaurant, the normal way of doing things. I came back at about
two o'clock, a normal afternoon's work, except that I was on my own. My
Agent, the General Manager, was out for the afternoon because he was
seeing the Viceroy off at Howrah station. Now the Viceroy used to come
down every winter and spend about a fortnight in Calcutta, an official
fortnight there. He used to open up Viceroy's House, meet everybody,
entertain, go round about, show his face. Nice weather in the winter in
Calcutta. On the 15th of January he was due to go back in the Viceroy's
train and that was due to leave Howrah station about half past two.
I came back from lunch and at a quarter past two; I
suddenly felt a bit seasick. I thought, that's queer, I had a very
ordinary lunch, I didn't drink anything, no late night, it was all quite
normal as far as I could see. After a few seconds I suddenly saw a
clock -- I had an old fashioned clock with a pendulum, standard office
clock, the little pendulum you could see through a little window
underneath. That had stopped, it stopped at a quarter past two. I thought,
that's strange and then I suddenly realized everything was moving. I
thought, "Ah, well, it's an earthquake. Now it's the first earthquake I
can remember. This is interesting." Then it went on, so I thought, "This
is rather strange." I thought earthquakes were rather sudden and that was
that. Either the house fell down or you were all right. Outside -- this was
on the first floor of the office building, a great big building; it had a
first floor and there was a verandah along the whole of this floor with
the offices all taking off the verandah -- and outside I could hear the most
frightful hubbub. I put my nose outside and the whole of the office staff
were making their way to the stairway out to the courtyard and out into
the open street. They were all absolutely panic-stricken, they were
rushing. So I thought, "Well, that's rather silly, it can't go on any
longer and we're all right so far."
So I went into the next office to mine. Next door to me
was the railway policeman, and he was standing sort of looking at his
clock, which had also stopped, and he'd reached about the same stage of my
thinking. What do we do next? How long is this going on? Now, do we get
out with these people, or do we be British and stay here?
We eventually said, "Well, look here, let's get out,"
because the ground was still shaking, the whole building was swaying
about. And we walked in the crowd, fairly sedately downstairs, and out
into the main street of Calcutta, a street called Clive Street, a great
wide street with a wide pavement on either side and a row of trees
dividing the pavement from the road. We got out there and it was still
shaking and you could see the buildings, you could see them all swaying in
different time according to the heights. A minute or two after that it
stopped.
Well, we realized there'd been a real earthquake. I mean
this wasn't a minor shake, it was something really serious, so I beat it
back to my office. One of my jobs was that all the accident reports from
all of the railway used to be collected every morning and brought in and
were on my table when I arrived. I used to go through them and anything
that was important I used to pull out and show to the General Manager. I
had on my wall a huge map of the whole system and a lot of little flags.
Rather military. Within literally five minutes of getting back, the first
accident telegram came in. It was from a place called Jamalpur, which said
that the station had torn down, and that the workshops had collapsed, and
there was general trouble. And the line was blocked and no trains could
run through Jamalpur. So I marked this up with a pin. That was the first;
they came pouring in after this. After about half an hour one could see
exactly where the earthquake was simply by looking at these pins.
The great thing was, now what do we do with the Viceroy?
Half past two, his train was due to depart. They rang up from Howrah and
said, had I got any information for the General Manager? I said, "Well,
the only thing I've got so far is that it appears to be all on the main
line." The East Indian Railway ran from Calcutta to a place called
Asansol. There were four lines up to there. Asansol was a huge area,
center of the coal fields, a really big junction. From there two lines
branched out. The Viceroy's train was going to go over the direct route,
and it was quite clear from the first report when they asked me for it
that all this damage was so far appearing on the outside, old line, not on
the direct line. They said, "Right, we'll go to Asansol, check again when
we get to Asansol." Asansol was all right. By the time they got to
Asansol, it was clear that all the damage was up on the Ganges Valley, so
they went on eventually, quite all right up the rest of the line.
That year I went on leave. When I came back I found myself
posted to Jamalpur. Well, I thought, this is fine, there's going to be a
good job there. Jamalpur was the locomotive shops for the East Indian
Railway, the main locomotive workshops where we built our own locomotives,
the whole thing. Nothing imported. Up to that time all railways out there
used to build their own. This workshop was simply flattened. The whole of
the railway colony there more or less completely flat. My job really was
rebuilding this place, rebuilding the workshops, rebuilding the colony
complete. I had three and a half years solid slog on that. Of course, an
absolutely marvelous job.
There was such a vast amount of work that was done in
India, it's unbelievable. Some of these vast irrigation works which were
carried out are immense. To go back to the railways, you've got bridges
there that historically are the biggest bridges that were built at their
own time, long before many other places even thought about it. That
was all done by British engineers.
Major-General R.C.A. Edge:
I headed for Dehra Dun, which is one of the headquarters of the
Survey of India, and so they taught me how to make maps. I spent a very
pleasant month or so learning how to triangulate and that kind of thing in
the jungles and hills round Dehra Dun. And then when they reckoned I knew
enough, I and this other chap were sent off into the Himalayas. And that
was extremely enjoyable. Slightly dangerous -- two of our chaps were killed.
One fell down a crevasse, and one more or less died of exposure.
My next job of any size was in Southern India. I did a
triangulation there. That was entirely different type of country. Fairly
dense tropical jungle, full of snakes. I think I saw quite a lot of snakes
there. I never actually got bitten, but I certainly saw quite a lot.
Tigers, everything. That lasted for one winter. In the Survey of India you
had the pleasant arrangement that you did all your field work in the cold
weather, which was nice, and in the hot weather you went into a hill
station or somewhere where it tended to be a bit cooler. And the maps and
things that you'd been surveying in the field during the cool weather you
then drew up, or you did the calculations and things in the cooler place
in the hot weather.
Then they posted me up to northern India, to Murree, which
is a hill station, where we had the party which concentrated on air
survey, mostly air survey of the Frontier. And that used to have the
excellent system of spending the hot weather in Murree, where it was nice
and cool, and the cold weather on the Frontier where it was much warmer.
And we cooperated with the Air Force. They took photographs and we made
maps from them of the more or less inaccessible areas on the Frontier
under tribal rule.
You spent a lot of time out of doors in India. That was
one of the pleasant things about it. And a lot of time in camp. The camps
were very enjoyable. Depending on what you were doing you might be fairly
standing or your camp might be moving around. And it was always
rather pleasant if you were perhaps doing a triangulation, you might be
one place for a day and then you'd move on somewhere else. You'd probably
go and observe from the top of a hill somewhere, and you'd come back to an
entirely different place. And in the meantime your camp would have
moved. A fairly primitive means of transport. Bullock carts, usually. And
it was always rather pleasant to arrive at a place you hadn't seen
before and find your camp all set up. Your bearer with a hot bath
waiting for you and a bottle of whiskey on the table, or your tea made. It
was a sort of "moving home".
Doris Harlow:
The native people would report it if a tiger had been taking their
cattle. Then the forest officer would have to be responsible. Each part of
the forest was divided into what they call blocks. If there was a
dangerous tiger, of course, he was responsible. A maneater or one that was
really being a nuisance to the villagers, he'd have to go and deal with
that, but otherwise if there was just an ordinary, mild, common garden
tiger they'd know it was in a certain block and there were always people
wanting to come and shoot a tiger. They'd be allocated that particular
block.
Robin Adair:
When I was in the Santal Parganas I got the news from a local
planter who lived fairly far out. This chap was another indigo planter who
like many British people out in that part of India had settled down to
zemindari work -- the equivalent of a farmer. They had large tracts of land
which they used to cultivate. There was a bear worrying the villagers.
This particular one had come in from the outlying area and I think several
children had been mauled by the bear and the villagers were most anxious
that something should be done about it. So he contacted me as Deputy
Commissioner to see if I could arrange anything. So I went out there -- this
was a place very much out in the wilds really, very poor roads to get to
it. I had a jeep in those days so that I was able to cope with pretty
rough tracks. So I got out there in my jeep and I stayed the night with
this chap. He had a very nice bungalow out there. The next morning we got
the local Subinspector of police to come round with a couple of large bore
guns. I had my own rifle of course and this chap also had a gun.
So we set out in a party to try to round up the bear. The
villagers knew where it was roughly. It had got into a small patch of
jungle not far from the village, very thick, scrubby jungle on a fairly
steep sloping hillside with a bit of fairly clear ground around. They said
the bear was definitely in this bit of jungle. So we tried to scare it out
with noises, beating the bushes with lathis, but to no avail. Eventually
we sort of surrounded this clump of jungle, getting closer and closer in.
I saw what looked like a sort of dark patch. It was obviously the bear but
I couldn't make out which part of the bear it was. I thought, well, we've
got to flush him out somehow, so I gave him a shot and he came roaring
out. Instead of running away as one would have expected, he charged me,
came straight at me.
It was quite a frightening sight actually. Pretty big
creatures these bears. They stand, I suppose, over six feet high; they run
on their hind legs waving their front paws; the paws have claws as long as
one's fingers, razor-sharp claws. They slash at you with these claws,
which is their method of attack. I suppose he'd been wounded only fairly
slightly; it hadn't impaired his action at all. He was clearly very
annoyed and he came out roaring with these big slavering jaws and long
teeth. It was quite a frightening sight. Very fortunately I had another
barrel and I gave him a second shot and this knocked him down -- didn't kill
him but it knocked him down and he rolled over down the hill and then we
were able to close in and give him a final quietus. It was quite an
exciting experience. I had been particularly invited in by the villagers
to try to cope with this local menace.
John Stubbs
I had two maneating leopards in the last district I
was in, Garwahl in the Himalayas. The trouble with these leopards is
they're scavengers and if they pick up a dead body they sometimes get a
taste for human flesh. When I got to Garwahl I found there was one leopard
that had been operating for nine years without anybody doing much about it
and I spent an awful lot of time after that one. I didn't actually shoot
it. I shot several leopards when I was trying to get it. I spent an awful
lot of time sleeping in villages and sitting up in trees at night.
Kay Stubbs
The trouble was, you see, the Himalayas run in
sort of horizontal ranges and you're on the top of this one and then a
fellow over there says, "We've just seen the leopard." You've got to go
all the way down and back up to someplace else. You can't just pop across.
John Stubbs
In periods of three or four days, out and
back again, I suppose I was after it for three or four months. When I
finally got it, I'd shot two or three without it being the right one. I
finally got this one but I didn't shoot it, I poisoned it, because I was
using every kind of method I could to get it. You've no idea what terror
they inspire. Nobody would leave the door open at night anywhere in the
village. There's no sanitation at all, so that anybody taken short in the
night didn't dare go out and you could smell the smell of human excrement
in that village.
I remember one village I was in. This one I did shoot.
This one wasn't a very established maneater. It killed a boy. In the hot
weather they used to sleep out in sort of kraals on the mountainside and
watched their goats. This boy went out of the kraal in the middle of the
night to urinate and the leopard caught him, killed him and ate him. They
said that the leopard used to come every night and scratch at the door.
Certainly it did happen that leopards used to try to claw their way into
houses and they did go into houses and kill people. Well, I slept in this
village two or three nights. It was a terrifying experience. I sat up in
the village one night and I didn't hear anything and finally I tied up a
goat and the goat was killed and I managed to shoot it.
That one so far as I know only killed one person. The
other one must have killed or mauled dozens of people. Actually it was
operating over an area of fifteen square miles so you never knew where it
was. In one night he attacked eight people. It was a very stormy night and
I think he got away with one of them. The others were mauled, managed to
fight him off. I had great excitement with that one, a very interesting
evening. I had a goat killed and I was sitting up over the body of the
goat. I was up in this tree over a nullah. I suddenly looked down and I
saw this leopard lying just like a cat underneath in the bright moonlight,
a most lovely sight. I got my rifle down and I shot the leopard, hit it in
the lungs or something, and it went off out of my sight. I didn't know if
I'd killed it or not and it gave a roar. My torch went out when I fired
the shot -- the shock of it -- and I was trying to get the torch back into
operation. And then I suddenly heard an extraordinary noise from behind
coming up this watercourse and an enormous dog hyena came up under my tree
and he started to howl, the most devilish, awful, frightening noise I've
ever heard. I thought to myself, "I'd better shoot this hyena," and I was
just going to get up my rifle, and he suddenly gave a sort of roar and
charged something further that I couldn't see. The leopard by this time
was dead, though I didn't know it was. He rushed at this leopard, caught
it in his jaws and he was shaking it like a rat. The most amazing sight.
Then he heard me and pushed off. A most eerie noise, his hyena yell, like
a ghost in hell.
Then I went on and shot another one which I had quite a
bit of excitement with because I had to follow it up for a couple of miles
across the hillside. Then I got nearer again to the maneater near a house
where it had killed a boy earlier on, so I went and sat up over these
beasts outside the house and my torch let me down. I knew the animal was
there. I could hear something. I got down off the tree and I poisoned the
kill and I went up to bed and we found him dead later on.
There was a very sporting effort by one of the officers of
the local regiment. He and his brother sat up. One of them went to bed on
the verandah, the other one sat up over him. It was a very sporting
effort.
Well, you see, these were all the troubles a DO [district
officer] had on the job. I didn't want to sit down and have people in my
district eaten! However, I got a very nice lot of skins, made a coat which
a niece now has, and I tell her if anyone complains of her wearing leopard
skins to tell them that they weren't shot except in a good cause. That's
the last thing I did before I left India. I was determined to get rid of
this animal.
Two Great Armies
Fergus Innes:
The brighter Indian Army officers were excellent, and the ones who
really took to work on the Northwest Frontier, the hard, lean men you
would see out with the Khassadars and the Tochi Scouts and so on, they
were magnificent fellows. They got very kean on their regiments and on
their particular type of men. And the Indian Army really became a
magnificent body, the largest volunteer army in the world.
Major-General William Odling:
We had to do most of our soldiering in the winter. One used to be
in camp probably for two months. We used to go to camp with all arms,
maneuvering and so on, and we very often used to march there. Then we used
to go on to our shooting camp, where we used to fire the guns, practiced.
So those had to be fitted in in the winter. You didn't get these generals
coming down from the hills in the summers. You were left very much in
peace. Furthermore the summer tended to be leave time. People were very
generous about leave. In a small unit with five or six officers, there
were probably two on leave in England. One might be climbing Everest or
shooting up in the hillside. Another one, married, was up seeing his wife
in a hill station. Then a military course, a course of instruction in one
of the schools. You were usually down to one officer out of about six in
the summer. And the service wives were sent away, too -- not that there were
very many of them. And about a quarter of the service were in the hill
stations, not to recuperate but to freshen up. And so one was down to very
small numbers. And it was a marvelous experience for a young chap, because
he found himself doing absolutely everything. You know, he was the battery
commander. All the problems fell on his shoulder, and he was kept very
busy.
Lt.Col. John Masters:
We Indian Army officers always used to talk about our men when we
met. Somebody would say, "What are you?" And I'd say, "I'm a Gurkha." I
wouldn't say, "I'm a British officer," I'd say, "I'm a Gurkha." And he'd
say, "What's he?" "Oh, he's a Sikh." Then we'd get together and talk and
regularly everybody said, "Well, our chaps are the best," and we'd try and
say why and so forth. But you'd find Sikhs, officers of Sikhs, say that
they're the best troops, the best people in the world, providing you work
them twenty-five hours a day and kick them in the teeth regularly once a
day without any justification. Otherwise they'll be intriguing. You've got
to make them drop in their tracks. "Well, why don't you go to transfer to
Mahrattas?" "I? Good God, I don't want to serve with anyone but Sikhs!"
That is the tradition of the Indian Army. You do get
involved. You get drunk with the men and they carry you back to bed. The
British Army officers to some extent and certainly American officers are
always amazed at the contrast between the iron discipline of the Indian
Army and the extreme freedom other ways. But the reason, as Philip Mason
points out -- I think he points out -- is that there was such an enormous gap,
inherent gap, between a British officer and a raw recruit, an Indian
recruit -- the one could never become the other in the early days -- that you
could let your hair down far more because there was no possible chance of
the guy taking advantage of you, and certainly they never did. You see,
you're not expected to marry before you are about thirty, because you have
to devote those ten years to playing football with the men, going out
shooting and taking them with you, whatever -- hunting, snipe shooting,
checking the Himalayas, whatever. At night when we'd finish -- not every
night but twice a week -- I'd go up to the lines and have a rum in the
canteen with the soldiers, or Gurkha officers would take us to their mess
and we'd sit around and drink rum and eat little pakoras, curried meat
patty things, and quite frequently I'd finish up getting pretty soused,
but we had to be on parade the next morning. And the next morning -- we
might have been falling down drunk the night before and singing indecent
Gurkha songs with the Gurkha officers -- but my subadar would greet me with
no trace of a smile on his face and salute and report the parade
state -- the whole thing cut off.
Brigadier Frank McCallum:
When I was young and just joined the regiment, in the first
deshera, any new British officer had to cut off a goat's head with a
kukri. Somebody was holding the goat's hind legs, he was nice and
stretched. And you made a mighty swipe and if you didn't get it off in
one, the crowd rushed in and used to get the blood out and smear your face
with it.
We joined in all their religious ceremonies. There is a
great slaughter time which involves the sacrifice of a buffalo. The
buffalo is tied to a pole in the middle of this rectangular place and the
head is cut off. The bleeding carcass was dragged around and then a priest
would collect the blood and put some rice in it and he used to come to all
the officers, put it on their foreheads, and pray. It was a very religious
and moving ceremony. All at the side of this rectangle was a bamboo
enclosure with a proportion of the arms of each company, all the officers'
swords and their medals -- one of ours had a VC and that was terrific -- and
the blood used to be sprinkled round there. It was asking blessings on the
arms for the next year and I don't see anything wrong with that at all.
There are many ways up to the mountain, aren't there, aren't there?
Major-General R.C.A. Edge:
Each regiment and corps had its own recruiting area that it got
its recruits from. And every now and then you got sent on a recruiting
tour. That was quite fun. You went around to all the villages, examining
the recruits. And you always had a doctor with you. The drill was you went
through the recruiting area, the various villages. And there were always
far more recruits than you could possibly recruit, so you took the best.
And they then turned up at the training battalion. And it was quite
extraordinary to see the way they changed from being rather shabby, ragged
peasants into soldiers -- a sort of transformation. It took six months to
make them look like soldiers. Their training actually went on longer than
that.
Sir George Abel:
The Punjab has the Himalayas behind it of course and there is
always the possibility of going up on a little bit of leave or something.
I was subdivisional officer in a place called Dalhousie fairly early in my
first couple or third year of service, and people used to come in and say
there was a panther that was killing, or a leopard that was killing their
goats, or they might come in and say there were bears which were
destroying the crops and was there anybody who could come and shoot them?
And one night I went with an orderly in order to be up at dawn to see if I
could shoot one of these bears that was causing destruction of the maize
crop. I passed a little house on the edge of a village. We were walking
along a sort of contour line around the mountain in the moonlight. To my
astonishment I heard a man apparently drilling a platoon of British troops
in this silent place. He was in fact teaching his small son whom he wanted
to get into the Army. "Left, right, left, right, halt, about face." We
walked on into the moonlight and I thought, "Well, this is remarkable."
Brigadier John Dinwiddie:
The Frontier was inhabited by a lot of very turbulent people. They
had to live, these people, and they lived by raiding and pinching other
people's goods. That had to be combated. So a large part of the Indian
Army and a whole lot of irregulars were constantly keeping what they
called watch and ward. There was five hundred miles of Frontier and we had
fifty-five thousand regular troops in that area as well as armed police
and irregular forces. For years nothing would happen and then everything
blows
up.
The Frontier extended from Chitral, from the Pamirs, to
the Arabian Gulf, about five hundred miles. We reckoned that if the whole
Frontier rose as one they would have half a million fighting men. But they
never did of course. Just pockets of them here and there. Some of them
never uprose and some were always a pain in the neck. They did give the
Indian Army a tremendous experience. It was marvelous for the junior
officers and the men. It was the grounding of soldiering.
Lt.Col. John Masters:
I suppose the natural thing is, the soldier always disagrees with
the administrator. They have different viewpoints. Like when we have a war
in the Northwest Frontier, the Political Agents come on, and their job,
their interest lies with the enemy because that's the people they live
among. The Political Agent is there to keep the tribesmen cool and calm
and happy. They wouldn't be any good if they didn't associate themselves
with a tribal point of view, but when we're out there getting men killed
and disemboweled and castrated on the mountain, we don't think it's funny.
Sir Benjamin Bromhead:
I'll tell you a story now. I've forgotten where it was now. There
were all these political officers running about. There was a bit of a
fight and a bit of a beat-up and Lord knows what else. At the end of the
day when we were back in camp, the political officer came back and came
into the mess and he said, "I think the boys fought very well indeed." He
wasn't talking about our troops, he was talking about the bloody Pathans!
I'll tell you one thing about the Afridis because I knew
them very well. They were full of feuds, interfamily feuds, intertribal
feuds. They were terrible. There was a lot who lived right at the very top
of the Afridi country, very high up and they were troubled because they
had no saint of their own, no shrine of a holy man. So they invited a holy
man to come stay with them and they murdered him and they made a great big
huzzah. So then they had somebody to pray to. That was nothing. It's true.
We had an Afridi subadar in the South Waziristan Scouts
called Khan Boz. He was known for shooting all his cousins in feuds. His
nickname in the Scouts was the Pashto for "Cousin." He was a frightful
boaster. When he went on leave he had to take an escort with him; he had a
false beard which he put on. He could never go on leave on a direct route,
he had to get to his home by some circuitous route and travelling by
night, and he thought nothing of it. It was their way of life.
Colonel W.A. Salmon
Razmak was seventy-five miles beyond the administrative border,
and so you had to be very careful there because you were just in the
middle of the tribesmen. They were no respecters of anybody and if they
found anybody wandering off course or doing anything silly, you didn't get
away with it. We used to have to go out on what was called column every
month, which was really showing the flag. We went out about a week at a
time, the entire brigade, four battalions plus the artillery and the
sapper company and the whole lot, leaving a small garrison behind to look
after the camp. You covered a distance of anything up to seventy or eighty
miles through the mountains. As you went through, the advance guard had to
put pickets up on to the mountains to be quite certain that the column
couldn't get sniped at. There was one lovely occasion. We had to do this
all year and it always rained in the summer. June was a bad month, just
poured with rain up there then. There was one occasion when one of my
platoons had to form a picket and we were soaked to the skin. He'd been
out three days and the blankets, the bedding, everything was absolutely
soaked. It was entirely uncomfortable. Rain was still teeming down and we
were going along on this column and we had to go up and bag the heights.
When you got up to the top of the hill you had to quickly get the stones,
all the stones around you, and make what was called a sangar. You couldn't
just lie out in the open or chaps would come and have a pot at you, so you
had to be protected. You had one fellow looking out that way, one looking
out that way and two this way the whole time. You always had two spare,
resting, and then you changed them around.
Well, two chaps one awful wet day sitting in the sangar
waiting their turn to go on guard, rain teeming down, soaked to the skin.
And one says to the other, "Say, Jock, if you was to win the Derby sweep,
what'd you do with the money?" "Oh," said his pal, "I'd buy myself out of
the Army and go home." "Ah no," says the other, "I wouldn't. I'd buy up
the whole of this effin' country and I'd put it out of bounds to British
troops!"
Brigadier Frank McCallum:
Gurkhas always got on well with British soldiers. Always. How the
devil they spoke I don't know. You'd see the two of them squatting by the
roadside, pulling out a cigarette. "Cigarette, Johnny?" "Cigarette,
Tommy?" And they'd smoke. What the deuce they spoke about I don't know.
The Northamptonshire Regiment we looked after very well on
one particular column. When it came to Christmas time in Razmak -- Razmak
was an enormous, great garrison; they say it's the largest monastery in
the world, about ten thousand men, no women at all -- the senior Gurkha
officer came up and asked if they could take over all the guards and
pickets of this Northampton battalion at Christmas time, which was
accepted. There was a great friendliness. They were always in our canteen
because they liked the rum, and our men were in their canteen because they
liked the beer. But no British soldier was ever put up for being drunk
because the Gurkhas always took him back and put him to bed. Then when it
came to deshera time the Northamptons came and said they'd take over our
guards. Yes. That was pretty marvelous. When the Northamptons left they
were given a presentation kukri and in return they gave us a silver
honorary member's card making us honorary members of their mess forever.
Major-General Sir Charles Dalton:
The British soldiers led a much more sophisticated life in India
than they did at home. They were more important people and in fact the
British soldier in India was quite a personality. In England of course a
British soldier cleans all his own boots and buttons. Spit and polish
everything. But there he didn't. It was infra dig for a soldier to do all
these menial things. He was a fighting man and he had a menial chap in the
shape of an Indian bearer who he shared probably and paid some pittance
to. In fact he even used to get shaved in bed in the morning before he
woke up. The barber used to come round the barrack room with an ordinary
open razor -- most of the chaps in the same room mucked in and they paid
him. And he would come round and by the time the soldier woke up, he was
shaven. He jumped straight out of bed, put his clothes on, jumped on his
horse and away he went, quite likely having had somebody else to get his
horse cleaned and saddled for him. So for a time the British soldiers
thought this was wonderful, but it palled after a bit because there were
no girls, no white women. Although they took up with some of the Indians,
this was very much discouraged, and not a lot of them did, I don't think.
They got reasonable leave, but they got bored. They played hockey and
cricket, but they missed the sort of life the soldier leads in a military
station in England. His ideal station is a place like Aldershot, which is
absolutely full of soldiers, and women, and shops, and cinema. They didn't
get much of that in India.
Margery Hall:
There was absolutely nobody of the troops' class for them to meet
at all. Nobody. Nothing was ever done about it. They had nothing. They had
the bazaar women to go with, and they always got venereal disease and what
have you. And they had a very rough life on one and sixpence a day, or
whatever it was they got paid, hardly anything. It was terrible. I don't
know how they ever existed or how they stuck India. A very different life
from the one we led.
They Lived in the 16th Century: Managing the
Princes
C.J. Pelly:
In India the tradition of reverence for the ruler was felt very
strongly. Obedience and obeisance given to these rulers was a thing of
tradition. It wasn't put on or feigned.
G.N. Jackson:
There were a great number of princes. They ranged from the Nizam,
who was bigger than any of them, down to little, small estates whose civil
service consisted of one policeman and perhaps one schoolmaster. There
were six hundred of them. They were guaranteed in their position by the
British Crown. After the Mutiny, Queen Victoria guaranteed the princes in
their position so they enjoyed an extraordinary system of security and
tenure, enjoying the protection of the British Crown. If you enjoy
protection to that extent it does tend to make you a little arbitrary. We
had to preserve a very nice balance between maintaining them in their
position and at the same time getting them to behave in a responsible way
and spend enough of their money on their subjects and not the most of it
on themselves. Some of them were very responsible, very good indeed.
There were eccentrics. One I knew well whose passion was
writing and producing his own plays. He held that his plays were of far
greater artistic and educational value than all the schools in his state
and he was liable to use the education budget entirely to produce his
plays. Every village had a playhouse. It didn't necessarily have a school.
His actors and troupes used to put on plays for the villages but he didn't
spend any money on reading and writing. There are people who would argue
perhaps he's right, but we couldn't quite take that view. He wasn't an
unpopular maharajah, he was very much liked. The agitation against him
came from the politicians in neighboring British India.
There was another extraordinarily good maharajah who had a
very fine administration, wonderful roads and schools and communication,
hospitals. He had the unfortunate thing that his oldest son -- he was the
heir apparent -- fancied himself an amateur doctor. He was liable to go into
the hospitals where they had some appendix cases and would operate
himself -- to his father's infinite chagrin.
Keith Roy:
The princely states varied in size, in economic viability, in
administrative efficiency. Mysore, for example, which is in the south of
India, the Maharajah of Mysore was one of the most enlightened rulers you
can possibly imagine. He had enormous educational programs for the people,
road programs, health programs, and so dealing with him was no difficulty.
Others, like Jaipur, Bikaner, not so large or as wealthy as Mysore, but
very, very advanced in all of their thinking and operations. On the other
hand, right down at the other end of the list were small, small, little
enclaves -- they weren't really states -- where they just couldn't do
anything. But the concept that is sometimes created that the maharajahs
lived a life of luxury, totally secluded from their peoples is not a
correct view. The majority of them were very, very enlightened rulers,
concerned with the welfare of the people, but in what we would call a
benevolent despotism. There were virtually no democratic processes in
these states, let's be quite frank about it, but that doesn't mean there
were ruthless tyrannies. Many of the maharajahs were the most enlightened
people, concerned with the welfare of their people.
John Shattock:
I was posted to Chamba as Dewan, or Chief Minister. The Rajah of
Chamba had died; he left a small son and you had a minority. Always with a
minority someone had to rule the state while he grew up and was trained.
In Chamba there were a series of Dewans -- which means Chief Minister -- for a
number of years and I was the last. The way I arrived there was a very
strange and unusual thing. The road did not go into Chamba, the capital.
The last bit I had to do on horseback. It was a hill state
up in the Punjab. Just before you reached the town you had to go right
down hill to the river and then you had to go up the other side to where
there was a flat maidan, an open playing field, and lined up there were
all the state officials. There was the Rajah to greet me and his private
secretary (whom the Viceroy had made him appoint to look after his money
affairs). The Rajah introduced me to all these people and at the end of
the line -- this is something that has always fascinated me ever
since -- there were four young men. I shook hands with the first two, and
the Rajah suddenly pushed me back. "Mr. Shattock, you can't shake hands
with those last two." I was mystified. I bowed and they bowed. Late that
evening I said to the private secretary, "Would you please tell me why I
was allowed to shake
hands with the first two of the young men and why not the last two?" And
his answer was, "Well, you see, the first two were the sons of the
recognized concubines of the late Rajah. The last two were the sons of the
unrecognized concubines." I said, "Such a subtlety is beyond my
understanding."
H.P. Hall:
I spent six months in Indore doing odd sorts of jobs, making
friends with the maharajah and his entourage. One of the jobs I had was in
charge of an opium factory at Neemuch, which was about a hundred and sixty
miles from Indore. No railway there, go by road. We went to this place,
which was a ghost town. It was originally built as a cavalry station many,
many years before, at the turn of the century; then they discovered there
wasn't sufficient water for the animals, the horses. General Ochterlony
had his headquarters there at one stage and they had a Eurasian chap
running this factory. He was the only chap there, and he ran Ochterlony's
house -- which was a big building with a corridor going down one side for
his Muslim wives and a corridor going down the other side for his Hindu
concubines -- as a club -- it had a tennis court which we used to use there
occasionally. But he ran it as a club because he got things at a discount
by calling it a club. Although General Ochterlony had died about a hundred
years before, the local people still revered him. In fact there was a
little plaque to say that he lived there, and there were flowers, wreaths
and thing, still there to the day that I was there. There were two opium
factories, I think, in India because in those days you could still be
registered as an addict and you could still get opium.
There was a state which was about a hundred miles away
from Indore, no other communications except by road. And they had a guest
house which was on the river, and I went down there on a visit. And this
place was really right out in the wilds, miles from any civilization. And
the maharajah who ran this particular place prided himself on being able
to give you any drink that you'd care to name. So there was a competition.
You'd sort of name the rarest drink that you'd ever heard of and they'd
have to fix it. That was number one. But they entertained us on the river.
And this was 1937, beginning of '38. And we had two barges on the river,
one in which the banquet was served, and it was a first class meal of
umpteen courses, and wine, and drinks because he'd provide any drink you'd
like to name. And the barge next to us was where the band was, playing to
us. I mean Nero in Rome just wasn't in it. But this was the pageantry that
we went under.
It was pathetic in many other ways. The Resident's wife
wouldn't let me go to one state. She regarded me as young and innocent,
and she wouldn't let me go because it was one of these states which was in
disfavor. The maharajah had gone a bit haywire, and he'd got tired of
girls and he'd turned his attention to boys, and she thought this would be
bad for me, so I wasn't allowed to go there. There were all sorts of
stories about his behavior.
Arthur Barlow:
When I was higher up in Central India, one day we were going to
inspect. I set out to inspect a jail and when we got to the jail the door
was locked. And so we rattled on the door -- the ruler's officials were with
us, you see. A voice said, "What do you want?" "The officer sahib has
come. We want to come in and inspect you." He said, "Wait a minute, the
key is down in the bazaar. One of the prisoners has taken it. He's buying
food." And then a man was seen just running from the bazaar with a lettuce
under one arm and a loaf under the other. He ran up and opened the door.
When we went in and -- the ruler was there with us; he didn't seem a bit
abashed -- and after the inspection was over, I said, "Where's the
inspection book?" It was my duty to write a note. They produced it and I
turned it open and looked at it and the last entry was one from the ruler
himself which said, "I see the jail is empty. It must be half full before
the inspecting officer arrives."
John Stubbs:
The Nawab of Rampur ruled a little state which used to be the old
Rohilla kingdom. The family of the last Rohilla chieftain were given this
state, the remains of the Rohilla state of Rampur. My father, when he was
Commissioner, was also Political Agent of the Nawab and we were very fond
of the Nawab's family and he was very fond of us. Whenever I wanted to
have a rest I used to go there. The Nawab used to say, "Come and spend a
weekend." I used to go to the palace and he used to say, "Just make
yourself at home, anything you like," and I used to say, "Well, if I can
have a horse to ride in the morning that will do very well." One time I
went there and somebody had told the Nawab that I liked pig sticking, so
we had great fun. He turned out the whole army -- which consisted of a
platoon of Gurkhas and some very wild and woolly Pathan cavalry -- and all
the Nawab's elephants -- and we beat the palace gardens for pig. It was
very, very dangerous because when you were galloping after a pig you
suddenly looked round and one of these wild sowars with his pagri between
his teeth and his spear was just behind you. It was great fun.
Major Christopher York:
The Nizam's whole palace was built on deep, deep cellars which
were filled with gold and precious jewels. And one room would be full of
emeralds. This is the story; how true it is, I don't know. And another
would be full of diamonds, another would be full of rubies and so on, and
this room full of gold. He was supposed to be the richest man in the
world.
Lady Daphne Dalton:
The Nizam of Byderabad was the richest man in the world -- but
incredibly mean. He was a very, very funny little man. Very autocratic.
And if you went there to dinner -- he used to have dinner parties every few
months or so -- and he never used to have proper domestic arrangements, in a
way. He lived very simply himself, so if he had a dinner party, he used to
put the thing out to tender, and you'd get a very indifferent meal served
by rather poorish looking servants, not dressed in proper beautiful
clothes, as most of the others would be. And the Nizam would be sitting in
the middle of the table, flanked by his most important guests. And the
wine used to go round. If it went round more than once, or at the very
most twice, you'd see the Nizam gesture. You weren't allowed to do any
more.
He had a very enormous harem, reputedly about three
hundred, including daughters and things. And they weren't allowed to come
to dinner. But after dinner, when the ladies retired into a sort of
drawing room, about three of these miserable daughters used to be produced
to mingle with the guests. And we used to feel so sorry for these girls,
because they were frightfully badly dressed -- in cotton saris and cotton
stockings. Flat, black strap shoes and black stockings and cotton saris.
And here was this man who, if he put half of his money on the world
market, there would have been a crisis.
And every year they had to have this parade. It was rather
like feudal England, where somebody had to provide a certain number of
troops. And my stepfather, being adviser to the state forces, every year
this parade had to be held. And it was quite amusing because in fact it
was a fairly lighthearted affair in a way, because most of the things that
were produced weren't really able to go to war. They were probably all
scratched up from nowhere much. You had camel carts and camels pulling
guns, and all sorts of very antiquated affairs. A few trained troops,
proper ones, but the main body of it was very feudal, and going back many
years -- elephants and camels pulling things along, and a rabble of sort of
supposedly soldiers. Because you had to produce x number of able bodied
fighters, as it were. And in order to do this, you didn't probably keep
them under arms all the year round. You just got them on parade one day a
year -- except for a small nucleus of well-trained state forces. But this
parade was quite an eye opener, all rattling along in the dust.
Sir Alec Ogilvie:
My father was what was called Agent to the Governor General in
what was then RaJputana. There was a state called Bikaner and the
Maharajah used to give Christmas shoots one had to experience to realize
what life was in imperial India. It was absolutely fascinating. I was just
a young man and I was given a week's local leave. I went there by train
from Calcutta to Delhi -- it was a twenty-four hour train journey and then
one had to change trains and go to a place called Bhatinda, where one
changed trains again to the Bikaner State Railway. Very cold, northern
India in December. My luggage went into the compartment and it was
bitterly cold and I was running up and down the platform about three a.m.
And I finally went up to the guard and asked, "When is this train due to
start?" And he said, "Your honor, this train is waiting for you." I wanted
to keep warm.
Having got to Bikaner, it was a unique experience because
he used to have a house party of about sixty people. I arrived Christmas
Eve and on Christmas Day there was a vast party for these European guests
with Father Christmas arriving on a white elephant preceded by the state
band. This sort of thing was fabulous.
Then the whole house party was moved out after Christmas
about twenty miles away to a place called Gajner where there was a lake
and three days' shooting, everything arranged absolutely perfectly. Two
days of grouse, one day of duck.
Roy Metcalf:
The Nawab, who used to be a well-known cricketer, had met an
Indian girl in Switzerland. They knew each other well but still had to go
through a native marriage ceremony, and we went to the wedding and we went
to the celebration afterwards and the Nawab was there with his Begum but
he had his Negro mistress at his feet. It so incensed my Resident that we
got up and walked out. Oh, he was quite eccentric. He used to play bicycle
polo with his Political Agent in the courtyard of the palace every
afternoon. The Political Agent had to sit on a bicycle and play bicycle
polo with the Nawab. In Central India they still used to keep up the odd
custom after an important wedding of firing a gun when penetration had
been effected on the first night of the honeymoon. They'd all got their
little eccentricities, but they were all quite sort of -- scratch them and
there was still quite a bit of uncivilization and fierceness under most of
them. Given the chance they could be very despotic.
Kay Stubbs:
We went to stay with the Nawab of Rampur. No sooner had we arrived
at the palace when an elephant trundled up to a sort of verandah,
completely laden down with flowers. My mother was absolutely charmed
because she said she'd been given a lot of flowers in her time, but she
said she'd never had an elephant load before.
Diana Debrett:
The great thing was the Governor's Cup, which was a cup presented
by the governor in person. And I well remember a wonderful time when
Kashmir wanted to win it. And he had bribed every single jockey -- except
the rider of a roaring outsider, whose name was Bushbooze. And of course I
didn't bet Bushbooze. And the race started, and it was run beautifully,
but instead of Kashmir's horse, which was called Jai Bawani II -- he was all
set to win, you see. But Bushbooze's jockey hadn't been squared, so he
went -- whoosh! -- straight through and won! The next year it was dropped
correct, and Kashmir won, because he didn't make that mistake twice.
Kate Smith-Pearse:
C. was a very fine shot. This was [later] the maharajah who shot a
thousand tigers. We went and stayed in his state and they all shot. The
whole family. There was nothing else to do really. We thought it was
dreadful, until we went and stayed in the state. From his capital there
were five roads radiated out and each member of the maharajah's family
went out every single night and shot on these things. The maharani went on
one -- she was a Nepali woman -- the maharajah went on one, his two other sons
went on two other roads and C. had another road. When we stayed there we
went out on C.'s road and there as we went along were spotlights and
little platforms -- I'm sorry to say with goats tied up to them to attract
animals. But we came to the conclusion it was much better to do that than
to sit at home and drink and perhaps have women. There was nothing else to
do. They weren't great readers, no music, no television. So we thought it
was really more healthy for them to go out shooting the odd deer.
I went there once when the maharajah opened some buildings
and I had to sit next to him driving along in a car which was painted like
a tiger lined in red plush. And then the maharajah was bowing to that
side. Everyone was saying, "Maharaja! Maharaja!" And I was bowing to this
side and pretending. Oh, it was such fun, it really was so amusing.
A friend and I were asked to stay in one state before the visit of
the Governor. We went along to see that everything was all right. The
bathroom was about the size of this, lovely, all tesellated, the floor,
and the bath and the basin. But no outlet. You lifted up the plug of the
bath and the water just swished over the whole place. Your clothes would
be floating about. We did say to the rajah -- this was the royal guest suite
that we occupied before the Governor came -- "You know, you really ought to
have a pipe attached." But he never did.
The maharajah of S. gave me five panther skins for a coat.
I had them made up by a nice furrier in London -- in Wimpole Street or
someplace like that -- and she said, "How do you manage to get panther skins
like this?" And I said, "I know a maharajah who shoots eighty during the
cold weather. He shoots twenty a month and he just sells them to the
Marwaris. He doesn't know what to do with them." So I said, "But I can get
you dozens of skins." She said, "Yes, I'd love to have them." Do you know,
this maharajah sent me eighty skins, all cured in all these packing cases
and I was going to ship them to London. He was going to make money, he was
quite keen to sell them. War broke out just then and I had those eighty
skins in the house in these packing cases all during the war. Every now
and then I had to put all these skins all around so they didn't get damp
or motheaten or something. Wasn't it a shame? In the end one of our boys
[in the school for princes] -- his father, who had something to do with
skins -- he actually wasn't a maharajah -- took over the skins and bought
them. That very nice maharajah gave me all the money for my medicine for
the villages. He was awfully nice.
G.N. Jackson:
I was Assistant Political Agent in South Waziristan. The people of
South Waziristan were very poor. It was a very mountainous, rugged, very
poor, arid country. They were also very warlike, very good fighters. They
spent most of their time fighting each other, stealing each other's
livestock. When they weren't doing that they were stealing livestock and
girls and things from across the border in British India and the Political
Agent's problem really was to try and pacify the tribes. When people are
stealing each other's livestock because they're hungry the main problem is
to find a better means of livelihood. So one of our main problems was to
try and make peace between the various subsections of the tribe; secondly,
to stop them from raiding British India, but mainly to provide an economic
basis so that they could do without raids. We did everything we could to
improve their agriculture. We taught them how to grow all sorts of things
that they'd never heard of before like apricots and peaches. We tried very
hard to get them employment in British India. We worked very hard to get
them contracts with the government. We tried to recruit them into various
government services. We did everything we could to raise their standard of
living to the point where they didn't have to steal each other's cattle
and didn't have to raid into British India and tried to maintain law and
order while we were doing it. We also paid them subsidies, of course.
H.P. Hall:
When I was in Lora Lai District I was the Assistant Political
Agent and we ran an area which was umpteen square miles with borders with
Sind and the Punjab and the Northwest Frontier Province.
Very wild country, not near railheads or anything like
that. The Khetrans were the tribe that lived on the Punjab border. The old
tribal chief had died and his son had taken over from him. His son had
been educated at one of the chief's colleges in Lahore and had come back
with very modern views about how he should manage his tribe, which didn't
get on very well with the tribal leaders. There was trouble in the tribe
there. One of his uncles was visiting me in Lora Lai. Every morning the
tribal chaps used to come around; we always had open houses for them. He
said to me -- I'd been up to their area, knocking heads together, saying
they really must get on, none of this internal strife, fighting, in fact.
He said to me, "Oh, if any of these chaps are giving you trouble, just let
me know and I'll deal with him for you." Bump him off in fact. I had to
say to him that I couldn't really take advantage of that offer.
I'm sorry to say that two or three weeks later I had to
lock him up. There wasn't much in the way of resources, revenue in the
area. Baluchistan was very rugged country where if you had some water,
you'd have an oasis and you could grow wheat and food grains and you could
run a few goats and sheep. But it was a pretty subsistence-like existence.
But you used to have mail lorries, mail contracts, and they were a good
source of revenue. Most communication was by roads, there were no trains.
Some rival had got the mail contract and he didn't like it, so he'd shot
up the mail lorry.
Earlier on in my Fort Sandeman days I had been on leave in
Kashmir. When I came back on a different route, which brought me to Lora
Lai, I had to do the trip from Lora Lai to Fort Sandeman -- this was about a
hundred and twenty miles or so. I was going up by the mail lorry, which
went up two or three times a week, and the Zhob Militia chap said, "Oh
there's one of our lorries which has been down in Lora Lai. You can hop a
lift back on that, because it's done its journey, it'll be going back
empty. Come back on that." When I went to catch the Zhob Militia lorry,
the driver said, "Oh, there's something gone wrong with it, the ignition."
This, of course, was a put-up job, which I knew, because he wanted to use
the lorry himself and make some money out of it. However, I said not as we
can get it fixed and we got it fixed and drove back. Driving in that part
of the world you had to sign out whenever you left one of the townships
and they sent a telegram to the other end. Then you had to sign in at the
other end. I went off in the Zhob Militia lorry and got in to Fort
Sandeman. Then we discovered that the mail lorry was late and hadn't come
in. In fact, that mail lorry had been shot up. What they did, in
fact -- part of the area was a pass you had to go through, twisty road -- they
put a whole string of boulders across the road around a corner so the
lorry or car would come around the corner and have to stop. They just
loosed shots into this lorry, killed a couple of people. And that was the
lorry I should have been on.
That sort of thing happened quite frequently. We didn't
mind if they shot themselves up, but if they shot up one of the Indian
Political Service's, then we took prompt action. There was one chap who
was in Quetta and Political Agent in Fort Sandeman later on who was
assasinated by one of his levies, who said that he hadn't been promoted
and the Political Agent was foolish enough to say he never would be
promoted, so the chap drew a pistol and shot him. We lost one or two
people, but usually by accident, because they shot the next car that was
coming around the corner and if you happened to be in it, that was too
bad.
I was held up by a gang once. They thought I was the
garrison engineer, who was paying road gangs. When they discovered I was
Assistant Political Agent, of course they let me go. I don't know what
they would have done to the garrison engineer. They might just have taken
the money from him and let him go on. We were right out in the blue and
saw these people down at the bottom. I had a couple of chaps, levies, with
me in the car. They said they were hostile, but the blunt fact of it was
we were on a narrow track; it would have been difficult to turn and go
back and, anyway, I said, "To hell with this. My area, I go down." I went
down and stopped and talked to them. They were a hostile gang, in fact,
but they let us go, they knew who we were. We lived with that sort of
thing all the time. Just took it as part of the job.
Baluchistan, which had a population of two and a half
million and an area the size of England, Scotland and Wales put together,
was administered by twelve administrative officers. We did it because the
tribes were quite happy for us to do so. If the tribesmen had not accepted
our guidance and our advice and our instructions, you would have needed
several divisions of troops to do what we were doing.
An Introduction
1. The Passage to India | interviews
2. Running Your Empire |
interviews
3. Life in the Bungalows |
interviews
4. Imperial Diversions |
interviews
5. Never the Twain? |
interviews
6. No More India to Go to |
interviews
|