Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official

by Sir W. H. Sleeman

'Do you think the army would serve again now with the same spirit as they served under Lord Lake?'

'The army would go to any part of the world to serve such masters—no army had ever masters that cared for them like ours. We never asked to have flogging abolished; nor did we ever ask to have an increase of pay with length of service; and yet both have been done for us by the Company Bahādur.'

The old Sardār Bahādur came again to visit me on the 1st of December, with all the native officers who had come over from Sāgar to attend the court, seven in number. There were three very smart, sensible men among them; one of whom had been a volunteer at the capture of Java,[7] and the other at that of the Isle of France.[8] They all told me that they considered the abolition of corporal punishment a great blessing to the native army. 'Some bad men who had already lost their character, and consequently all hope of promotion, might be in less dread than before; but they were very few, and their regiments would soon get rid of them under the new law that gave the power of dismissal to regimental courts martial.'

'But I find the European officers are almost all of opinion that the abolition of flogging has been, or will be, attended with bad consequences.'

'They, sir, apprehend that there will not be sufficient restraint upon the loose characters of the regiment; but now that the sepoys have got an increase of pay in proportion to length of service there will be no danger of that. Where can they ever hope to get such another service if they forfeit that of the Company? If the dread of losing such a service is not sufficient to keep the bad in order, that of being put to work upon the roads in irons will. The good can always be kept in order by lighter punishments, when they have so much at stake as the loss of such a service by frequent offences. Some gentlemen think that a soldier does not feel disgraced by being flogged, unless the offence for which he has been flogged is in itself disgraceful. There is no soldier, sir, that does not feel disgraced by being tied up to the halberts and flogged in the face of all his comrades and the crowd that may choose to come and look at him; the sepoys are all of the same respectable families as ourselves, and they all enter the service in the hope of rising in time to the same stations as ourselves, if they conduct themselves well; their families look forward with the same hope. A man who has been tied up and flogged knows the disgrace that it will bring upon his family, and will sometimes rather die than return to it; indeed, as head of a family he could not be received at home.[9] But men do not feel disgraced in being flogged with a rattan at drill. While at the drill they consider themselves, and are considered by us all, as in the relation of scholars to their schoolmasters. Doing away with the rattan at drill had a very bad effect. Young men were formerly, with the judicious use of the rattan, made fit to join the regiment at furthest in six months; but since the abolition of the rattan it takes twelve months to make them fit to be seen in the ranks. There was much virtue in the rattan, and it should never have been given up. We have all been flogged with the rattan at the drill, and never felt ourselves disgraced by it-we were shāgirds (scholars), and the drill-sergeant, who had the rattan, was our ustād (schoolmaster); but when we left the drill, and took our station in the ranks as sepoys, the case was altered, and we should have felt disgraced by a flogging, whatever might have been the nature of the offence we committed. The drill will never get on so well as it used to do, unless the rattan be called into use again; but we apprehend no evil from the abolition of corporal punishment afterwards. People are apt to attribute to this abolition offences that have nothing to do with it; and for which ample punishments are still provided. If a man fires at his officer, people are apt to say it is because flogging has been done away with; but a man who deliberately fires at his officer is prepared to undergo worse punishment than flogging.[10]

'Do you not think that the increase of pay with length of service to the sepoys will have a good effect in tending to give to regiments more active and intelligent native officers? Old sepoys who are not so will now have less cause to complain if passed over, will they not?'

'If the sepoys thought that the increase of pay was given with this view, they would rather not have it at all. To pass over men merely because they happen to have grown old, we consider very cruel and unjust. They all enter the service young, and go on doing their duty till they become old, in the hope that they shall get promotion when it comes to their turn. If they are disappointed, and young men, or greater favourites with their European officers, are put over their heads, they become heart-broken. We all feel for them, and are always sorry to see an old soldier passed over, unless he has been guilty of any manifest crime, or neglect of duty. He has always some relations among the native officers who know his family, for we all try to get our relations into the same regiment with ourselves when they are eligible. They know what that family will suffer when they learn that he has no longer any hopes of rising in the service, and has become miserable. Supersessions create distress and bad feelings throughout a regiment, even when the best men are promoted, which cannot always be the case; for the greatest favourites are not always the best men. Many of our old European officers, like yourself, are absent on staff or civil employments; and the command of companies often devolves upon very young subalterns, who know little or nothing of the character of their men. They recommend those whom they have found most active and intelligent, and believe to be the best; but their opportunities of learning the characters of the men have been few. They have seen and observed the young, active, and forward; but they often know nothing of the steady, unobtrusive old soldier, who has done his duty ably in all situations, without placing himself prominently forward in any. The commanding officers seldom remain long with the same regiment, and, consequently, seldom know enough of the men to be able to judge of the justice of the selections for promotion. Where a man has been guilty of a crime, or neglected his duty, we feel no sympathy for him, and are not ashamed to tell him so, and put him down[11] when he complains.'

Here the old Sūbadār, who had been at the taking of the Isle of France, mentioned that when he was senior Jemadār of his regiment, and a vacancy had occurred to bring him in as Sūbadār, he was sent for by his commanding officer, and told that, by orders from headquarters, he was to be passed over, on account of his advanced age, and supposed infirmity. 'I felt,' said the old man, 'as if I had been struck by lightning, and fell down dead. The colonel was a good man, and had seen much service. He had me taken into the open air; and when I recovered, he told me that he would write to the Commander-in-Chief, and represent my case. He did so, and I was promoted; and I have since done my duty as Sūbadār for ten years.'[12]

The Sardār Bahādur told me that only two men in our regiment had been that year superseded, one for insolence, and the other for neglect of duty; and that officers and sepoys were all happy in consequence—the young, because they felt more secure of being promoted if they did their duty; and the old, because, they felt an interest in their young relations. 'In those regiments,' said he, 'where supersessions have been more numerous, old and young are dispirited and unhappy. They all feel that the good old rule of right (hakk), as long as a man does his duty well, can no longer be relied upon.'

When two companies of my regiment passed through Jubbulpore a few days after this conversation on their way from Sāgar to Seoni, I rode out a mile or two to meet them. They had not seen me for sixteen years, but almost all the native commissioned and non- commissioned officers were personally known to me. They were all very glad to see me, and I rode along with them to their place of encampment, where I had ready a feast of sweetmeats. They liked me as a young man, and are, I believe, proud of me as an old one. Old and young spoke with evident delight of the rigid adherence on the part of the present commanding officer, Colonel Presgrave, to the good old rule of 'hakk' (right) in the recent promotions to the vacancies occasioned by the annual transfer to the invalid establishment. We might, no doubt, have in every regiment a few smarter native officers by disregarding this rule than by adhering to it; but we should, in the diminution of the good feeling towards the European officers and the Government, lose a thousand times more than we gained. They now go on from youth to old age, from the drill to the retired pension, happy and satisfied that there is no service on earth so good for them.[13] With admirable moral, but little or no literary education, the native officers of our regiments never dream of aspiring to anything more than is now held out to them, and the mass of the soldiers are inspired with devotion to the service, and every feeling with which we could wish to have them inspired, by the hope of becoming officers in time, if they discharge their duties faithfully and zealously. Deprive the mass of this hope, give the commissions to an exclusive class of natives, or to a favoured few, chosen often, if not commonly, without reference to the feelings or qualifications we most want in our native officers, and our native army will soon cease to have the same feelings of devotion towards the Government, and of attachment and respect towards their European officers that they now have. The young, ambitions, and aspiring native officers will soon try to teach the great mass that their interest and that of the European officers and European Government are by no means one and the same, as they have been hitherto led to suppose; and it is upon the good feeling of this great mass that we have to depend for support. To secure this good feeling, we can well afford to sacrifice a little efficiency at the drill. It was unwise in one of the commanders-in-chief to direct that no soldier in our Bengal native regiments should be promoted unless he could read and write-it was to prohibit the promotion of the best, and direct the promotion of the worst, soldiers in the ranks. In India a military officer is rated as a gentleman by his birth, that is caste, and by his deportment in all his relations of life, not by his knowledge of books.