Sometimes The Battle is Rigged

In 1845 the Sikh Empire and the John Company stumbled into war with one another. The causes were petty and nobody can agree who made the first provocation, but the two powers were rising in northern India and the British had been recently weakened by losing an army in Afghanistan. This is not a story that many people outside India know, unless they are Sikhs themselves. But if you take the time to hear it, it gives you some new questions to ask yourself as you think about ancient battles and adventurers.

The Sikh Empire and the British Empire had very similar armies, with large numbers of troops trained in the European style, and a gaggle of allies of questionable military value armed and dressed in many different ways. They also had similar political systems: both were aristocratic empires with democratic elements which extracted resources from the rural and urban poor. The British Governor-General harrumphed that the Sikh army saw itself as the Sikh commonwealth in arms, which was “dangerous military democracy.” The greatest difference was at the top. Whereas nineteenth-century Britain had a tidy parliamentary system and an orderly civil and military bureaucracy, and the East India Company was a corporation with a board and annual financial reports governed by British law, the Sikh empire was a crab bucket where Sikh leaders, tributary princes, and the army snapped at each other and tried to pull each other down. Wealthy Sikhs were often murdered by political rivals such as the Dogra brothers of Jammu and Kashmir. And unto this came Alexander Gardner, an adventurer who had spent the years 1819 to 1830 wandering through Central Asia doing some prospecting here and some horse-thieving and slave-taking there. Somewhere or other Gardner had learned enough to call himself an artillery expert, and the Sikhs were busy modernizing their artillery and not too picky about who they hired. He survived the intrigues, but the war with the British put him in a delicate situation, because although he insisted he was an American, there were persistent rumours that he was a British subject. Gardner did not lack physical courage, but he could see many ways that the war could end badly for him if he never stopped a shrapnel ball. Long afterwards he explained himself in writing. John Keay tells the story in The Tartan Tuban (2017):

According to the colonel himself, his war was over long before it began. ‘I started originally with the army,’ he explains, ‘but was recalled by the Rani, and she specifically insisted that I was wanted to hold Lahore against the Khalsa.’ He was to bring back with him no Sikhs, only such Muslim troops as were serving under him. ‘My orders were simple: “No Sikhs are to return; manage that and the rest shall be as you like.’ Though the order came from the rani, it could as well have come from Gulab Singh in Jammu, for whom Gardner says he was once again acting as agent and factotum.’ Either way, and with an irony typical of the whole war, Lahore was to be held by non-Sikhs on behalf of the court and its least dependable feudatory, and denied to the Sikh army that was supposedly fighting in its defense.
Precisely when Gardner was recalled is a matter for debate. He himself implies that it was before crossing the Sutlej (an eastern tributary of the Indus) or reaching the front. Yet a report by (the Sikhs’ French tactical advisor) Mouton, which was published in Paris immediately after the war, suggests a rather different story. According to Mouton, the Kalsa’s Moslem gunners and their colonel withdrew only after fording the Sutlej on 12 December 1845, and after the first battle, that of Mukdi, on 18 December 1845. During the nocturnal retreat from that rather indecisive affair, says Mouton, the colonel of the artillery abandoned seventeen guns and fled away to Lahore taking all of his men with him. By way of justificatin, Mouton ads that the Rani had previously written to the non-Sikhs of the artillery to the effect that ‘when the Sickes (sic) should come to blows with the English, they should abandon them and come to Lahore, where she would recompense them for their devotion to her cause.’

Mouton fails to identify who the colonel in question was. Moreover the accusation about a colonel and his men having abandoned their guns and fled is contradicted by British reports about the Sikh gunners at Mukdi displaying ‘reckless bravery and devotion to their guns’; indeed ‘they never left them and died rather than yield’, says a Colonel Robertson. But the number of guns later recovered by the British was exactly the seventeen mentioned, and Gardner is very specific about all the men he brought back being Muslims. It looks like like one and the same incident; and if it was, and if he was indeed the colonel referred to, one can understand his reticence. Once he had ‘fled’ or withdrawn, he stood exposed as a deserter. Having done so on the rani’s instructions, he was revealed as a traitor to the army in which he served. And having fought at all he would be deemed persona non grata by the British and might be subject to a post-war deportation order Like that which would bring Mouton himself back to Paris to tell his side of the story. As so often the holes in Gardner’s narrative prompt greater doubts than the colourful fabric they perforate.
The Muslim gunners, he adds, ‘were enchanted at the recall, and on our return I was, as it were, governor of Lahore’. Mouton disagrees, asserting that the gunners were not at all enchanted: on the contrary, they were disbanded and arrested, and their homes ‘were looted by (the rani’s) people’. Similarly Gardner’s claims to have been ‘as it were, governor’ of the city would cut no ice with Grey and Garrett. They were surely right in suggesting that he exaggerated his role; in fact, on his own admission, ‘the only duty imposed on me was to protect the Maharani Jindan and her child, and to get the dreaded Khalsa army destroyed somehow’. But of this, his first admission that he too was actively engaged in sabotaging the Sikh war effort, he would say no more. Discretion was again proving the better part of candour. (pp. 195, 196, my transcription with help from tesseract OCR)

The whole history of India in the eighteenth and nineteenth century is like this. Outside of the Mutiny of 1857, every ‘noble clash of arms’ was followed by accusations that the British had bribed key figures on the other side, or that the loser was betrayed by allies. In many cases, the British did not bother to fight at all, just made themselves indispensable then invented a reason to toss out the raja or rani (or refuse to recognize an heir). Subversion and bribery were a proud part of the Indian tradition of warfare since Kautilya, and the British were just as ruthless and had more stable finances, because merchants and democracies manage money better than princes and warlords. It reminds me of fifteenth-century Italy or the Wars of the Roses:

Soldiers of Bengal, be not so bold.
For Jafar thy master is bought and sold. (with apologies to Shakespeare, Richard III, act V scene 3)

As the war continued, the Sikh generals kept being slow when they needed to be fast, or ordered their troops into a bad position then disappeared when the enemy arrived. The Khalsa army fought hard, but fighting hard was not enough if its leaders did not fight smart. The Sikh Khalsa army was destroyed, and the British came to the gates of Lahore and imposed a peace. There was more fighting in the years to come, but without a drilled and paid army, nobody in the Sikh empire could resist the British. The British were greedy but they at least discouraged the murders and kept enough order that people could work the land and practice their trades. Over time, the two nations found ways to work together. Gardner died peacefully as an old man with wives and children, one of whom even managed to join polite British society as that society became more socially and racially exclusive. Everyone but the soldiers too honest to run away got what they wanted.

We know what happened in the First Anglo-Sikh War because we have whole archives of primary sources, letters, and memoirs. Even then, we don’t always know who ordered a murder or whether someone was kindly but ineffectual or a drug-sodden nonentity. This kind of evidence from the ancient world has long been lost, so we can know even less. But having a wide variety of cases in our memories widens our imagination when we interpret those few ancient sources. The most important aspect of the Sikh war was not exactly what pattern of howitzer the Khalsa Army used or how sepoys in East India Company service were drilled to perform a right wheel. It was that parts of the Sikh leadership were more frightened of their own army than the John Company, and did not want their army to return home unscathed and victorious.

Many people – some of them wargamers, but others trained historians – tell the story of battles like Cunaxa or Magnesia as if they were technical trials at a research center experimenting with muzzle velocity and readiness rates. They write about the pros and cons of various types of troops, and the virtues and vices of different commanders, if they were operating in a training area in front of a promotion board. In doing so, they often sound rather naive and trusting. When Diodorus records a story that Artaxerxes’ troops fought the Greeks for some time before running, we don’t have to trust Xenophon’s claim that they ran the moment the Greeks came within bowshot, and rationalize why they ran. That is tooth-fairy science: investigating something (“the Persians ran away”) before making sure it actually happened. We can do better, but the first step is admitting that many battles are as fixed as a boxing match at Las Vegas in the 1950s.

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(scheduled 21 March 2026)