Plain Tales From
                          The Frontier
_____________________________

Home Ministerji was gnashing his teeth. ‘‘First we have to teach Pakistan a lesson.’’

SOLDIER SAHIBS:
THE MEN WHO MADE THE NORTHWEST FRONTIER
By Charles Allen
John Murray
Price: Rs 700

One of the primary casualties of the juggernaut of post-modernism has been elegance. Many of the so-called tomes of contemporary history, for instance, may be clever and skillful, but are so tedious and sometimes so painfully boring that they appeal to only those who have already been converted to the cause, or those who might take masochistic delight in torturing themselves with, quite simply, unreadable prose. In many ways, this is surprising.

Edward Thompson, who initiated the subaltern revolution in the writing of history, wrote with elegance and passion. His magnum opus, History of the English Working Class, is a pleasure to read, and Thompson, whether writing history or polemical prose, put a premium on accessibility and sought the widest possible audience for his writings. Thompson’s self-appointed intellectual heirs, however, have done him great disservice by clinging to his pro-people focus, but abandoning the storyteller’s approach so essential to make history readable and inspirational. The added influence of French intellectuals has only further tortured the writing of history. Not surprisingly, it is rare to find in India the kind of works that have been recently produced, for instance, by the British historian, Simon Schama. Schama’s volume on the French Revolution, for example, was not just a model of research and scholarship, but became a popular bestseller.

The writing of good old-fashioned history has, therefore, been often left to amateurs and the dilettante. This odd tribe sometimes produces a good tale, but only occasionally is the story rooted in rigorous research and scholarship. Charles Allen seems to have succeeded at both. Allen has a long connection with India. Six generations of his family lived in India and served under the British Raj. He grew up in Assam, where his father was a Political Officer on the North-East Frontier, and his earlier writings — Plain Tales from the Raj and Lives of the Indian Princes — have been widely read. In Soldier Sahibs: The Men Who Made the North-West Frontier, Allen sticks to his tested formula: recreating a slice of Imperial history through a fast-paced and slick narrative.

The book’s apparent focus is the British policy in the North-West Frontier in the 1850s, and the foundations that were laid for the boundary that exists today between Pakistan and Afghanistan. But the real story is not as much about Imperial policy, but of a group of extraordinary young men, known collectedly as Henry Lawrence’s young men, who helped conquer the frontier of the British empire, and especially the controversial Brigadier-General John Nicholson. As is only to be expected, the book lays no claims to political correctness (the first war of independence is the mutiny of 1857) or indeed to rigid tests of scholarly objectivity, but it does address the moral dilemmas arising out of almost deifying men like Nicholson.

As Allen on points out, until 1947, men like Nicholson were heroes of the Empire, who were role models for generations of young men and who inspired creative works of the highest order. But “the post 1947 mood was very different; Heroes of Empire were no longer required.” He adds: “I can still remember the frisson of shock I felt when I first opened a popular history of British India written in the mid 1980s and saw my family paragon described as a bully, a racist, a religious bigot and, to cap it all, a homosexual sado-masochist. Nicholson was indeed remembered, but not at all as his colleagues would have wished to be. More than half a century after Independence, moral confusion still colours our attitudes to men like Nicholson, and to British rule in India in general.” The book represents Allen’s attempt to “come to terms with this uncertainty”.

So, what is the verdict? It is quite clear that men like Nicholson were driven by quite literally a missionary zeal, to accomplish the three objectives laid out by Thomas Macaulay: firstly, to rule “a great people sunk in the lowest depths of slavery and oppression so as to make them desirous and capable of all the privileges of citizens”; secondly, “to bestow on the swarming millions of India the blessings of rudimentary legislation”; and thirdly, “to create as intermediaries between themselves and these swarming millions a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but British in opinions, morals, intellect”. In the process of achieving this, these men were often rash, violent, arrogant, bigoted and patronising.

But the vital question that Allen raises is critical for a new debate on Imperial policy and its instruments: Should we judge men like Nicholson from the standards of today, or through the Victorian value system they were part of in Britain?

AMITABH MATTO

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