‘GATEWAY TO GANDAMAK’ — Novel published August 2022.
Read Chapter One FREE
At last! The book is off my desk, through the hands of the publisher, and onto Amazon (CLICK)
I’m delighted to see it in print, and so grateful to the team that has helped me get it published.
You can read the first chapter, ‘Commanding Heights’, below. I hope you enjoy it and buy the book. The details are at the end of this text.
“The city walls collapse into the moat; it is not the time to use the army” — I Ching (11, Thai)
Krishna the Traveller:
Have you ever caught a train in India? You may know what I mean: it can be one of the most delightful experiences or the worst. In Executive First Class, you will have been chauffeured to the railway station. Your porter has carried your bags, and you will be shown graciously and with dignity to a pre-booked comfortable air-conditioned seat or if the train is a sleeper, a cabin with clean, crisp sheets. Anything less than Second Class Air Conditioned (2AC) — there are many choices — is not so good. Perhaps you are sold on the idea of a smelly, sweaty, and overly friendly ride on a hard bench, but I am not.
Play that game as you wish. I’m a bit old now for the excitement and adrenaline rush of trying to find my name and seat number. There are colossal paper lists, written in tiny print, pinned up on notice boards on the platform. Being jostled by what seems to be the entire population of the Sub-continent is no fun. On a hot summer’s day, the heat and noise are indescribable. This cacophony might bring on a panic attack, an ailment that seems to have increased with age and the financial ability to insulate me from the crush. I plan to travel to Bhopal after my stay at Gwalior, and the extra fare will be worth every rupee.
I am on a teaching assignment. I enjoy passing on the little I have learned in my travels, and, of course, I have exceptional knowledge of Indian history. When the School of Studies in Ancient Indian History Culture and Archaeology at Jiwaji University called and suggested I provide a lecture, I took the paid chance to visit a city I had long wanted to see again. Jiwaji itself is pleasant enough, adjacent to the city centre, convenient for the railway station (though I had arrived after an adventurous car drive south from Delhi), full of leafy trees and places where people congregate to chat and keep fit. My genuine interest is to see the Gwalior Fort and its twin palaces, Gujari Mahal and Man Mandir. I want to see the ascent to the Fort and its twin enormous gates: The Elephant Gate (Hathi Pul), the last series of seven gates, the Badalgarh.
I waste no time. My hosts kindly pick me up from the Hotel Regency in a well-preserved Morris Ambassador. I have politely declined their offer of a guest room at the University and managed a quick brush-up and a cup of sweet milky tea in the ornate hotel dining room — and we drive the two miles or so to the Fort. It cannot be missed, looming over the city, a reminder of years of war, repression, imprisonment of noble captives, even torture, and the heroic efforts of the men who have captured the place more than once. This place has played a vital role in Indian history.
Gwalior Fort crouches above Gwalior city like a waiting tiger on a long, thin, rocky outcrop of towering sandstone called Gopachal. You will be awestruck by the distinctive reddish ochre colour, the castle walls dropping three hundred vertical feet to the city centre.
This city is a section of the famed Grand Trunk Road. Does not the “GT” bring a memory of fresh early morning starts, hot sweet tea, dust hanging as the day gathers its warmth, traffic of bullock carts and nowadays gaily coloured reefer trucks, stopping for afternoon char and a stretch of the legs? Purple night lowers as the lights flicker on.
There was a time, in my recollection, that this was just a well-used track, the “Uttapatha.” Chinese sages trudge their wise way to Taxila. The Three Magi pass as they chase the Bethlehem star. Mauryan rulers bring officialdom. Later, Emperor Ashoka planted trees, and built wells and “nimisdhayas” — guesthouses. In later times, pompous servants of the White Raj take tiffin, drink a welcome gin and tonic before dinner, a game of billiards and bed.
The thought of the GT brings scented memories. My Yamuna. She is of another ilk and out of this present time and world, black, beautiful, walking carelessly the first I saw of her by the banks of the crystal river, flowing from icy mountains and glaciers into the mighty Ganges.
This heaven-born daughter of the sky
Drives far the darkness,
Wakes human beings with her bright face,
Driving away the gloom
Through the shades of darkness
So, the Rig-Veda, and these fellows knew a thing or two. We shall meet her again, this transcendent being conceived of the sun.
I have diverted from the story I mean to tell. Where are we? At Gwalior Fort, in the late afternoon, after tea. My friends and I are walking relaxed on the broad plateau terrace. If you look left along the length of the Fort, the domed hanging galleries are a set from an early Bollywood movie, blue and ochre in a golden, deepening evening light. The city is a dark sea those many feet below us, cut with twinkling lights and the wafting smell of cooking fires and spices. You expect the movie’s leading man to appear in silk and a turban with a thin moustache and a charming smile. Why am I fascinated with this place?
Gwalior symbolizes India and its history. Some 21st-century scholars, suffering from an excess of revisionism and political correctness morphing into a newly virtuous “woke” kind of post-humanism, will see India as replete with happy indigenous peoples building a magnificent civilization until rudely colonized by loutish barbarians from the British Isles.
Kindly Rajahs ministered to gentle merchants and farmers while forest-dwelling Brahmins, safe from wild animals and no mention of robbers and lousy weather, developed their philosophies, later entitling them to spiritual spoils. It is the bright picture of India you may have in a faculty in Boston or at Stanford with a green card and a chance of tenure if you absorb enough post-imperial angst.
The British colonial raiders built their culture on invasion and conquest. No doubt the British were harsh, sometimes needlessly, occasionally but not always, deliberately. More arrogant, entitled, and bumbling. Indeed, all was not sweetness and light before the White Mughals arrived. After all, even the great and good Emperor Ashoka realized the Dharma as he stood on a battlefield where he had ruthlessly slaughtered thousands of his enemies.
India is for millennia a maelstrom of conflict, and Gwalior is in the eye of the storm. One loses count of the number of times the Fort is besieged and surrendered, remarkable when you stand on the ramparts three hundred feet above the plain and consider these victories by one faction, invader, or another.
On 3rd August 1780, a British officer and his troops (mainly Indian soldiers recruited or coerced into the ranks) confront the Maratha General, Mahadaji Scindia, who holds Gwalior Fort. After the action is over, it is eloquently described by the winner [Dear Reader, I am going to spare you much of the flowery rhetoric, they use four words when one would do]:
26th August 1780 To the Hon. Warren Hastings, Esquire, Governor-General, and Members of the Council, Gentlemen, I yesterday had the pleasure of congratulating you on the capture of Gwalior by the detachment under my command… This place, gentlemen, having been pronounced and with justice … to be impregnable, I have for a long time balanced in my mind the most eligible mode of attack … the fort is built on an exceedingly high rock and garrisoned by one thousand men … On the 3rd at midnight, Lieutenant Cameron, the field engineer, having prepared ladders … I ordered the party for the attack formed … two companies of grenadiers and light infantry led the van of the party. They were followed by twenty Europeans and two battalions of Sepoys. At break of day, the van arrived at the foot of the scarped rock: where ladders were immediately placed, and the troops ascended to the wall … the guards on the alarm assembled to the plain to dislodge the assailants, but our fire soon repulsed them with great loss, and the detachment pouring in very fast, we pushed to the body of the place … then conquest was now complete; at sunrise, or a little after, we were masters of the strongest hold in India. I have the honour to be … Etc. Captain William Popham, Bengal Army.
Soon after, the Commander-In-Chief, Lieutenant General Eyre Coote, minutes the G-G: “Captain Popham’s well-judged and successful disposition against the important fort of Gwalior has given us a powerful post in that quarter. Our possessing of it is of the utmost consequence … I must beg leave to recommend that the Government will bestow Major’s rank on Captain Popham.”
British understatement is terrific, isn’t it? Could today’s youth in futuristic clothes designed for “extreme sports” climb this slope? A hard slog, no doubt in the beating heat. Try it in a red woollen coat, wearing a leather shako, a pack and carrying a Brown Bess musket. For Popham, the risk of discovery was enormous, and had the initial advance and scaling been discovered, the Fort would have remained impregnable.
Here is a junior officer, a captain, deciding to mount an attack and carrying it out with exemplary wit, planning, and daring. It was his duty, and he did not hesitate. Soon after, the Fort is handed back to the local clan, the Scindias, and it is all for nothing — until the next time. The Marathas remain independent and a thorn in the British side.
British forces are pushed to their limit in the early 1840s. Impressed by the achievements of the Afghan tribespeople defeating the British at Gandamak, the independent Sikhs in Punjab are threatening; elsewhere, political upheaval has overturned the pro-British government in the Maratha State of Gwalior.
It is now 1843, and two young British officers, the very loutish imperialists so outrageous to our academics in Stanford (or Oxford, pick your history faculty), are about to experience one of the classic campaigns at the height of the Empire’s power. Theodore Bray is an ensign in the British Army, the 39th Regiment of Foot, raised in 1702 as Coote’s Foot. They are a British line infantry of yeoman and are renamed the Dorsetshire Regiment. As typical in these regiments, there is a family tradition, and Theodore’s father is a major in the same unit.
Herbert Mountforde is a year older than Bray and a rank ahead as a lieutenant — he has been a soldier since his teens. However, he is an officer in an “Indian” regiment, the Bengal Sappers and Miners, a unit of the Bengal Army established under the East India Company. The two young men are from a solid English middle or yeoman class, but Herbert is an “Indian,” though senior by rank; he is considered Theodore’s social inferior. Indian ideas of caste have been well absorbed. These ideas are universal, derived from humanity’s ape cousins though it is remarkable how closely the British class system fits into that of India. The force comprised Indian soldiers and sepoys, drawn from India and mixed with British units. By 1843, the Bengal Army is a formidable and dominant force.
In December Herbert’s company is posted to join the army that the Governor-General, the Earl of Ellenborough, is sending to Gwalior. The “G-G” needs a victory.
Consider if you will “Daddy” Gough, if only for his physical presence. He is a red-faced Irishman, has fought constantly since being commissioned in the Limerick Militia aged fourteen, and he is now sixty-four. He returns to India from China. He believes he won the Opium War single-handed and is promoted to full general and Commander-in-Chief of all British forces in India. Such combat experience may be exceptional for any time in history; he is undoubtedly the most experienced soldier in the British Army. He knows he is needed after the Afghan disaster.
Gough stands rigidly erect, a full head of white hair flared back from a high-domed forehead. Undoubtedly one of the most intimidating persons you can meet. Unfair. I found Gough to be open, honest, and straightforward, but equally — and arguably disastrously — rigid, insensitive, and unimaginative in his personality. His rough Irish brogue can be incomprehensible to English officers, but fortunately for some, he speaks little. He is a Victorian Imperialist. Impetuous but with a spine like a steel rod. He has one tactic: fix bayonets and attack straight down the middle.
In a fight, Daddy Gough wraps on a long, split-backed white coat, a duster, so that his men and the enemy can better see him. On the second day of fighting at the dreadful slaughter of Ferozepur, he stares through the smoke at the Sikh Khalsa that is poised to envelop him, jaw set, spreading the skirts of his duster as if a flag, drawing his sabre and growling, “Oi’ve niver been bate, and oi’ll not be bate naew!” Right. He is not beat. Never.
The British force faces a fierce, fighting enemy near three villages that block the main road about 20 miles north of Gwalior city. Gough is impatient, and his Irish strength of spirit combined with dogged ignorance leads to needless losses. He pushes his cavalry forward, and the 16th Lancers move through the rough broken ground, split by ravines. As the cavalry find their way through the dry scrub-filled nullahs, some twenty or more feet deep, they come under artillery fire and snipers. Muskets crackle, and powder smoke rolls like a heavy London fog. The advance slows and halts as the lancers get knocked down, and others dismount to seek cover or ride back. A battle has started from accidental first contact in a place where no sensible general will want to fight, except for Gough, who has neither the time nor the patience to find a way around. Gough wants to go in the only direction he knows, forwards across the awful killing ground now scattered with broken bodies of men and horses. He must send his engineers — sappers — to bridge the ravines and infantry to screen the work and provide these men with covering fire.
He needs artillery. However, the primary units of his artillery are well behind the forward line of battle. A fair assessment suggests waiting for them, but Gough is Gough. He has the Bengal Horse Artillery to hand, and he deploys them in front of the infantry because their guns will not range far enough if placed behind. They are outgunned.
Gough writes later in his formal after-action report:
I witnessed with much pride the rapidity of movement of the three troops of horse artillery, which bore a conspicuous part in this action; their leaders promptly brought them forward in every available position and the precision of their fire was admirable.
Precise shooting allows the British to advance, but the light field guns target Maratha gunners. Defiant salvo bursts hit an ammunition limber, and seven men disappear, the smoke clearing over the dismembered bodies.
Now the 39th and 40th Foot regiments and two native infantry regiments charge into Maharajpore village and drive the Maratha forces out; by midday, the battle is over, and the attempt by Gwalior to free itself from British control fails. A young puppet maharajah is back on the throne, a British force occupies the city, and a British Resident, a “political,” is in place to pull the strings by which the Company governs its empire.
The sappers have suffered, losing a third of the men. Led by Lieutenant Herbert Mountforde, slightly wounded in the calf, they advanced under this heavy, direct artillery fire, braved the snipers, and laid fascines, bundled from brushwood and scrub, into the narrowest parts of the nullahs. Mountforde is already a distinguished and experienced officer. He has been with George Broadfoot and Alexander Burnes in their epic journey from Delhi to Kabul to install the puppet Afghan King Shah Sujah. Mountforde has survived the Gandamak debacle the previous year and will win fame in later years during the Mutiny.
In his memoirs, another imperial soldier of immense stature, Charles Gordon — Gordon of Khartoum — describes the scene in the British camp:
During the evening, the mangled remains of what in the morning had been a band of brave men were committed to earth. Meantime in tents, the work of attending to the wounded went steadily on. There, officers and men whom we personally knew lay helpless, among them Major Bray of the 39th, and his son in adjoining cots, the former terribly burst by the explosions of a mine, the life-blood of the latter ebbing through a bullet wound in his chest.
Father and son Bray have stormed Maharajpore with the 39th and survived fierce hand-to-hand fighting. But snipers remain and are still shooting from the surrounding fields. Ensign Bray stoops to pick up the fallen regimental colours. As he straightens, raising the flag, a musket ball smacks his chest. That day the British lost eight hundred men. It is a lesson that Gough himself will not learn. Two years later, at Mudki and then Ferozeshah, facing the fearsome Sikh army, the Khalsa, on the border of the Company’s territory at the Sutlej River in Punjab, his straight down the centre attack exhausts his men against a far superior enemy.
The British narrowly escaped defeat with two hundred and fifty killed in the first engagement, including “Fighting Bob” Sale, famous now for his defence of Jalalabad, and George Broadfoot. His brother had been killed in Kabul. Nearly seven hundred are killed later. Gough is censured but goes on to greater glory and more loss of life at Chillianwallah. Despite victory (”Oi’ll niver be bate”) with huge casualties, he is finally reluctantly removed from command.
Gwalior and its Fort remain in the hands of the Scindia rajahs. Overseen by the Company, Gwalior is not done with the British yet.
Fifteen years later, fighting raged along the GT road for a year. Indian troops have rebelled against their colonial masters, and both sides commit awful atrocities. It is a vicious racial and religious war, pitting the British against Indians, Hindus and Muslims and Sikhs against each other. But by June, national resistance flickers only in the city of Jhansi.
There is one other place I wish to visit in Gwalior. A small park about half a mile from the Fort on the city side adjacent to the Swarna Rekha river. It is too late to visit this evening, and everyone is tired, so we pass it by, and it waits until after my work is done. I return now, taking a detour on my way to the railway station, lecture delivered successfully and with relief. The park is close by and is a simple hundred-yard rectangle of pleasant trees and a tall metal statue of a fine-looking woman waving a sword atop a rearing steed. Maharani Laxmi or Lakshmibai. The Rani of Jhansi envisioned charging the British cavalry before being shot and cut to death in her last moments. She is an Indian heroine of the resistance. The Indian Joan of Arc.
A famed British soldier, a member of Major-General Hugh Rose’s army that drove her from her precious Jhansi and forced a dramatic retreat north to Gwalior, knows the Rani well. He records pushing his horse through the crowded, dusty, noisy, filth-strewn streets of Jhansi, full of beggars, fakirs, snake charmers and the like to a shaded enclosure with a lake and marble colonnades. Meeting the Rani, he confides, “my first impression was of great, dark, almond eyes in a skin the colour of milky coffee with a long straight nose above a firm red mouth and chin, and hair as black as night.” He was instantly smitten. Of course, I knew her when Yamuna adopted the Rani’s close double, the remarkable female warrior Jhalkaribai, as her avatar and enabled the Rani to escape Rose’s soldiers.
Remarkable, was she? The Rani was raised in privilege to command and prominence in the palaces of the Maratha nobility. Jhalkari was a simple peasant girl “who worked at the household chores” and had risen largely by her efforts; perhaps Yamuna helped, but these things are complicated. I think the Rani’s nose was a trifle too long and her face too round, but we all have different tastes.
The Rani weathers the storm of the Rebellion cleverly, especially since she was a playmate in her childhood with Nana Saheb and the other rebel leader Tantia Tope. She keeps out of the war. Rebel leader? Not at all the case, at least until the last few months. Lakshmibai simply wanted Jhansi for herself and to be left alone. “Jhansi, my Jhansi”, she is fond of saying.
The myth that it was me, Krishna, who told her to say, “We fight for independence. We will if we are victorious, enjoy the fruits of victory, if defeated and killed on the field of battle, we shall surely earn eternal glory and salvation”, is pernicious nonsense. After all, does pretentious rubbish like this sound like me?
She played no part in the Rebellion, and in January 1858, as the fighting in the north dies away, Lucknow is relieved, Jhansi is at peace. But the governing fools in Calcutta have refused to accept her position as Rani after her husband died. The Company expects to apply the little-known Doctrine of Lapse and annex the kingdom of Jhansi because it does not have a male heir. The Rani refuses this decision. If tackled, she will fight back, for her beloved Jhansi, “Mera Jhansi denge nay — “I won’t give up my Jhansi.”
Sir Hugh Rose is a dour Scotsman, thin as a rake, stooped and a bit round-shouldered from his height, but with an exquisite style. He is not a Daddy Gough; instead, he is a good, careful, methodical, disciplined professional soldier with a formidable talent for organisation, which is different from a fighter. Sir Hugh would fight, fight hard himself in a charge, but win at minimum cost. He did. Rose is ordered to besiege Jhansi.
The siege forces the Rani into a dramatic escape towards Gwalior, where old Scindia has inevitably decided to back the wrong side. In a rough skirmish with the Irish Hussars, Lakshmibai fights against odds, sword aloft, alongside her beloved Pathans, pistoled in the stomach, striking a man down and then slashed across her back, falling heroically into the dust from her white charger and dying in the arms of a devoted servant.
Well, actual fighting is not much like that. Moving around a gun battery, lost, defeated, confused in the smoke and confusion, the Rani has a brush with a lost British cavalryman who cuts her leg. Her horse is injured, so she dismounts, limping, tired, and bloody, in a stumbling retreat as Rose drives the rebels back towards the city. Lakshmibai is exhausted, in pain, and thirsty from the crushing heat and dust. She sits for a moment to drink, slumped down near a grove of trees and a small pool.
A passing horseman shoots her in the head, as you would hit a wounded dog, without emotion or thought. Orders are for the British troops to give quarter to no one. The soldier might have spared a woman; he certainly would have if he had known who she was; the orders are she is not to be harmed. But the Rani fights in man’s clothes and the grey jacket of a sepoy.
Sir Hugh Rose writes that Rani Lakshmibai is “personable, clever and beautiful.” She is “the most dangerous of all Indian leaders.” He forgets that she was only dangerous because she has the character to refuse the treatment handed out from Calcutta. Rose says she was buried “with great ceremony under a tamarind tree under the Rock of Gwalior, where I saw her bones and ashes.” In truth, someone’s ashes were buried, but it is hard to identify ashes. It is unknown whether they were the remains of the small body left as a bloody bundle of rags beside the road.
Years later, Colonel Malleson writes in his ‘History of the Indian Mutiny’:
“Whatever her faults in British eyes may have been, her countrymen will ever remember that she was driven by ill-treatment into rebellion and lived and died for her country.”
Fair judgment.
I have spent a quiet half-hour on a bench by Lakshmibai’s pool remembering these events. My time in Gwalior is up, and the Ambassador is parked, the chauffeur patiently waiting. As I sit back, craning for a last glimpse of the Fort as we head to the railway station, there is a final part of the story. According to legend, Rani’s escape from Jhansi through the Orcha Gate (not the impossible jump on a horse from a thirty-foot wall described in local legend!) is enabled by a diversionary move that confuses Rose and delays a final assault on the city. The Rani appears in his camp! But this, so the story goes, is the double, Jhalkaribai, pretending to be her mistress and keeping up the pose until the Rani’s escape to Gwalior is assured.
There are two elements of doubt in this: first, Rose had no other opportunity to meet the Rani, but he swears he did so; remember, Rose is a religious, serious, and honest man. Second, a body is recovered, identified by a rich necklace worn under the clothing but unrecognizable from a shot in the face. A female dressed as a rebel soldier, wearing the Scindia necklace, is burned reverently in a funeral celebration.
Rose says that he saw her bones and ashes. Well, reach your conclusion. I can attest that Yamuna reappears among us about this time, delighted with a successful sojourn in this universe. And, of course, neither the Rani nor Jhalkaribai are seen or heard of again.
Now on to Bhopal. I have caught the train, and the carriage is all it should be. I sway into a long-deserved but comfortable sleep.
I hope you enjoyed that. There is much more to come in the book.
Details:
Published by: Precisely Company Ltd. www.precisely-asia.com
Copyright: G.J.Quartermaine 2022, the Author’s rights are asserted
ISBN: 978–616–94076–0–7 (Paperback)
Available on Amazon at:
There are various options, hardback and paperback colour prints, paperback black and white, Kindle and e-copy.
If you have difficulty finding or acquiring the book, please contact me on g.j.quartermaine@pm.me. Mark the Subject as Book Purchase
If you have the time, please do review the book. I enjoy criticism as much as praise; that’s how I learn.
