Free Sahib by Richard Holmes

understand the Indian caste system. What they really never grasped is that whatever your status as Englishman in India, to a devout Hindu you were always ritually unclean – and you can see why grasping that is unattractive. Even though I am Governor General of British India and a mighty figureand peer of the realm, that humble man crouching at my gate regards me as an unclean being – you can see why taking on the caste system was so difficult!
    I think the issue of the Enfield rifles is not simple, and not clear-cut. To say that the Mutiny was caused by a violation of caste is an oversimplification. People had been handling similar cartridges for some time. Going back to your earlier question – had we had more officers who understood their men better, who listened and felt seismically those undercurrents that exist in military units whatever their race or caste this might not have happened. Had their officers felt what was happening to their men, the Mutiny might not have happened in the same way.
    From dumdum bullets to the word ‘loot’, Sahib makes plain that the cultural exchange between India and Britain went both ways, though I couldn’t help feeling that you took rather a benign view of the latter – particularly where a slice of the spoils might ensure a greater commitment from the soldiers to any given campaign.
    Nowadays, perhaps through the novels of Patrick O’Brian, we tend to think of prize money as being an exclusively naval phenomenon, but of course it wasn’t. Throughout history there always was a substantial financial element to soldiering, which you can’t get away from. Armies were seldom held together by a belief in their cause alone. There was almost always a financial interest. These days we would hope that the soldiers get well paid and well looked after,but then it was in part because men could make their fortunes. You could go off on a campaign as a private soldier and emerge with some legitimate prize money that would buck your life up – you could come back to England and have raised yourself, respectably, by a whole social class. And many soldiers, mistrustful of bureaucracy and delays, simply short-circuited the prize money system by looting.
    And, finally, while you were researching this book what most surprised or interested you about soldiering in India?
    The thing that surprised me and interested me – and given time I’d like to examine further – were the Company’s Europeans. These were the people who decided to spend twenty-five, thirty years in India, who became professional soldiers in the most professional sense. They didn’t fit comfortably into many of those clichés about the British in India. Here were people who, in terms of social background, tended to be better educated than those who joined the British army. They were, at the risk of dying young and getting ghastly diseases, likely to get a better life in India. Often they simply slipped sideways into one of those administrative jobs in the ordnance department. I’d love to do more work on them because they are the category of ‘military artisan’ that historians don’t usually spend much time on because they are not officers or soldiers of the classic sort, and mercenaries isn’t quite right, but they are military specialists, and fascinating ones at that.

About the book
To the Tuck of Drum at Wandiwash
    By Richard Holmes
    I T IS ALWAYS DANGEROUS , I think, to have grand ideas about being an author. After all, writing is work, and hard work too. It is compulsive drudgery, domestic isolation and fevered dreams laced with occasional (and often delusive) satisfaction at a phrase well turned or a chapter neatly concluded. The sheer, mind-blowing euphoria of finishing a book is replaced almost immediately by an uneasy feeling of emptiness, and the arrival of the first finished copy of any book always reveals the infelicitous phrase or inexcusable error that somehow slipped past you in the proofs. Yet (and