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| June 19, 2000 | ||
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| Mutiny's
Bounty From the North-Western Frontier comes Charles Allen's new adventure story By Amit
Roy Allen, the sixth generation of his family to have served in India, explains the genesis of Soldier Sahibs: "I have this forebear, a great, great uncle called John Nicholson. I was told he was a great hero. He was called the 'Saviour of India'. Later on, when I started looking into Indian history, I found to my horror the same guy was being portrayed as a kind of psychopathic, sado-masochistic, paedophile mass killer." Nicholson and an equally "unpleasant" colleague, William Hodson, "by sword or spear probably killed about 200 people. They do it again and again and again and again with great pleasure". The author does manage to conjure up the image of the North-West Frontier as "a great place for romance, for testing of manhood, a kind of mythical place, of wily Pathans, derring-do, a scramble in the bush -- very Kiplingesque". The very first line of Soldier Sahibs sums up Nicholson's role in how India was won for the British: "The book concerns itself chiefly with events in north-west India between July, 1839, when 17-year-old John Nicholson landed at Calcutta as a cadet in the East India Company's Bengal Native Infantry, and September, 1857, when that same John Nicholson died of his wounds in the British camp below Delhi Ridge." It was Nicholson -- or "Nikkal Seyn" as his devoted Pakhtun and Sikh fighters called him -- who marched to Delhi from the Punjab, put down the uprising and effectively changed Indian history. Because of the inflexibility and moral certitude of Nicholson and his tribe, "I felt a strong parallel between the Brits and the Taliban," observes Allen, "Nicholson ends up controlling a large part of the Punjab through his own sharia." During his march to Delhi "he decides the cooks have poisoned the food. All the other officers are waiting for dinner and he comes in and says, 'I'm sorry gentlemen, I've been busy hanging the cooks'". Nicholson displayed a fondness -- some say over-fondness -- for a young part-Pathan boy, Muhammad Hayat Khan, to whom he felt he owed a debt. Khan's father, killed in a blood feud with his own brother, had once saved Nicholson's life. Khan, later to become a wealthy assistant commissioner, was the great-great grandfather of Tariq Ali, the Pakistani student leader of the 1960s, according to Allen's research. Behind Nicholson's courage and cruelty are deeper questions for Allen to ponder, such as the nature of the British relationship with India. Allen's father was typical of a breed of Brits, "A sad rootless generation of people who loved India in the abstract but not Indians. He was born before the First World War in Kanpur and died in Britain in the 1970s ... I remember my father hating Indian music." Allen argues that after the Mutiny, "We retreated. We felt the only way to preserve our culture was to build a psychological stockade around us and live apart from Indians." Yet today, he says, "My youngest daughter, who is 19, loves bhangra. Her generation feels at ease here and in India. Her generation is the hope of Britain" -- and India. |
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 © Living Media India Ltd |
Remember
the frightening Gabbar Singh in Sholay? Well, John Nicholson, the central
character in Charles Allen's Soldier Sahibs, was the Gabbar Singh of
mid-19th century British India. According to Allen, "People in the
Punjab would say to their children, 'Be quiet or Nicholson will get
you!'" Allen was born in Kanpur 60 years ago and lived in Assam until
he was seven with his father, a stern military man turned political
officer. Having been cast out from India not long after Partition, he now
resides, not entirely happily, in Somerset and indulges his nostalgia for
"paradise" lost by writing about India. He is best known, of
course, for Plain Tales from the Raj.