The year is 1824; the 6th Light Dragoons are still stationed in India and the talk is of war. For the Burmese are becoming ever more bold in their cross-border raids while in Rajputana the rightful claimant to the throne has been usurped by cruel warmonger Durjan Sal. With conflict now looming on two fronts, British troops must intervene.
Durjan Sal has taken refuge in the infamous and purportedly impregnable fortress of Bhurtpore and the trial ahead will test Captain Matthew Hervey and his newly blooded troop to their very limits, their fortunes to be decided by the sabre’s edge…
In his enigmatic memoir Bengal Lancer, Francis Yeats- Brown recounts how the Honourable East India Company received its licence to trade in Bengal. The Mughal overlord, the Emperor Shah Jehan, who built the Taj Mahal, had a daughter, Jehanara – ‘modest and beautiful’. One day Jehanara’s maid upset an oil lamp in the palace, and in trying to save her the princess scorched herself about the face and hands. Shah Jehan, distraught, sent word for the best physicians in the empire to come to Agra.
One Gabriel Broughton, surgeon of the Company’s factory at Surat, arrived quickly and, though hampered by the etiquette of purdah (he was only allowed to feel his patient’s pulse from behind a curtain), he not only healed Jehanara but also saved her legendary beauty. As reward, he would take nothing for himself, but asked that a charter be given to the Company to trade in Bengal. ‘These are the threads of karma that go to the making of ant-heaps and Empires,’ writes Yeats-Brown: ‘a clumsy slave girl, a kind princess, and an altruistic doctor who asked for the charter on which the British built Calcutta.’
When the Mughal hegemony began to weaken, in the middle of the eighteenth century, Bengal broke away from Delhi’s rule, along with Sind, Oudh and Gujerat, and the Company found itself increasingly drawn into the power politics of the successors to the empire. Fortunately there were Robert Clive, Warren Hastings and a great many others of their kind to advance British interests, and by the third decade of the next century John Company was the predominant power in the whole of India. But there were always challengers, within and without, and the sepoys of the armies of the presidencies of Bombay, Madras and – above all – Bengal, together with the handful of British (King’s) regiments for which the Company paid, found themselves from time to time campaigning hard. However, in India the climate and disease claimed many more lives than did the tulwar, the jezail or the jingal – in the war that begins my story, nineteen men out of the legions of twenties who died. But dead men’s boots meant promotion for the lucky ones who survived. That was the soldier’s silver lining in the clouds of war. How many of them, though, could expect to survive the feverish jungles of Burma, or the fortress of Bhurtpore, which had defied attacks for centuries, even by the British?