Editorial Note

Sita Ram Pande, the author of these memoirs, was one of the many Indian soldiers who helped the British to conquer India, and thereafter to hold it. He enlisted in 1812 as a sepoy into an infantry regiment of the Bengal Native Army, and he remained a soldier until he went on pension in 1860 after forty-eight years' service. During the intervening period he had taken part in the campaigns against the Gurkhas, the Pindaris and Mahrattas, and the Sikhs; he had been present at the storming of Bharatpore; and he had taken part in the ill-fated First Afghan War. He remained true to his salt during the Mutiny. He rose from Sepoy to Subedar, but only attained the latter rank when he was too old to be able to perform his duties. He claims that he was wounded seven times, taken prisoner once, and was awarded six medals. At the end of this long and interesting career, and at the behest of his last Commanding Officer, he set down in writing the story of his experiences in the service of the always incomprehensible British.

The expansion of British rule in India during the last century is abundantly documented. In addition to State Papers there are numerous memoirs, letters, and diaries of British officers, military and civilian, who played a part, great or small, in extending the frontiers of British India, and in pacifying the interior. Even more humble individuals, such as John Shipp and Private Waterfield, have committed their experiences to writing; but although it may be a mistake to claim for Sita Ram that his memoirs are unique of their kind, it can be said that they are the only account so far published of an Indian sepoy's experiences during the first half of the nineteenth century. Other memoirs may come to light in the future; they may be lying in a cupboard in some feudal mansion in Bundelkhand or the Punjab, or be hidden beneath the debris in a humble village home in Madras or Maharashtra. So far as is known, however, Sita Ram was the only Indian soldier of his time to yield to the persuasion of his British Commanding Officer and write the story of his life in the service of the Sirkar.

He was reluctant to write his memoirs and for obvious reasons. The Sirkar—a Hindi word meaning government or rule but applied in these pages to mean the East India Company—was the fount from which he drew his pension. It was for that pension, small enough in all conscience but sufficient to hold poverty at bay, that Sita Ram underwent so many trials and tribulations. He was fearful lest anything he wrote might offend the Government and result in the termination of his pension. And yet he wrote frankly, giving praise where praise was due, and where criticism was justified he was critical, both of the policies of the East India Company, and of the British officers under whose command he served. There is a great deal of wisdom in the old man's comments, written in the evening of his days, and who of us, with the advantages of hindsight, would quarrel with his observations on the folly of the First Afghan War, or with the causes to which he attributes the mutiny of the Bengal Native Army in 1857?

It is generally accepted that Sita Ram was persuaded to write his memoirs by Lieutenant-Colonel (later Major-General) J. T. Norgate under whom he had served in the 12th Punjab Infantry during the Mutiny. He completed the manuscript in 1861, shortly after his retirement, and sent one copy to Norgate, who was then serving in the Cantonment Magistrates' Department in the Punjab. A second copy may have been presented to the Bajpai family, the landlords of Sita Ram's village in the Rae Bareli district of Uttar Pradesh, between Lucknow and Allahabad. The manuscript is believed to have been written in the dialect known as Awadhi, or western Hindi, and was translated into English by Norgate, assisted by an Indian translator. The first publication, according to Norgate, was in an Indian periodical “since defunct”, and he claims that it received a favourable notice in The Times in 1863. However, a search in The Times of that year has not discovered the notice. The first extant edition was published in Lahore in 1873, and aroused sufficient interest for an Urdu translation to be made of the English text. There was a second English edition in 1880. Norgate seems to have remained in touch with Sita Ram for some years after 1861, and he makes no reference to the old man's death in the 1873 edition. In the 1880 edition, however, Norgate says that Sita Ram was probably dead. This is more than likely since he would by then have been over eighty, a great age for an Indian in those days.

There was no other edition until 1910, when Lieutenant-Colonel D. A. Phillott, secretary and member of the Board of Examiners in the vernacular languages, decided to use Sita Ram's memoirs as a textbook for the examinations. He translated Norgate's version into simple Urdu, and this version was serialized in Fauji Akhbar, the newspaper of the Indian Army until 1947. In 1911 Phillott published Norgate's English version, without alteration, “for the benefit of candidates”, and called this the third edition, regarding Norgate's publications of 1873 and 1880 as the first and second editions. His new Urdu translation of 1910—Part I of the official textbook for the Higher Standard Examination in Urdu—was titled Kawab-o-Khayal (Thoughts and Dreams). This book was an official text and successive editions were published in 1914, 1921, 1923, 1931, 1940 and 1943. As a standard textbook it became known to all British officers who served with the Indian Army, and to many officers of the British Army also.

Doubt has been cast on the authenticity of Sita Ram's memoirs by several authorities, and most recently by J. A. B. Palmer in his The Mutiny Outbreak at Meerut in 1857 (1967). Lord Sidmouth, a military historian of distinction who has closely studied Sita Ram's narrative, found it hard to account for the fact that it has proved impossible to establish with accuracy the regiments in which Sita Ram served. The fact that it has been impossible to trace the original Hindi manuscript, or Norgate's first English translation which he claims to have published in 1863 or thereabouts, has added to the doubts. However, the late Sir Girja Shankar Bajpai, one of India's most distinguished public servants, told Sir George Grierson in 1915 that he had read the Hindi version. Grierson, who was conducting the final examination of probationers for the Indian Civil Service, asked Bajpai to what copy he referred and the candidate replied, “Sita Ram gave my grandfather a copy of his book, and it is still in our family. I used to read it as a boy and knew it off by heart.” Unfortunately action was not taken to establish whether Bajpai had read Sita Ram's original manuscript, or merely Norgate's translation. His father said later that he did not possess Sita Ram's manuscript. Mr U. S. Bajpai, son of Sir G. S. Bajpai, has similarly denied any knowledge of Sita Ram's manuscript in a letter to me dated 22 August 1968. He went on to say that most of his grandfather's papers had been destroyed, and he could not recollect his father ever having mentioned the book to him.

Sir Patrick Cadell, the historian of the Bombay Army, who devoted many years to a study of Sita Ram's memoirs, came to the conclusion that the memoirs were genuine. “That the story is absolutely genuine, and Sita Ram's own, cannot, I think, be doubted,” he wrote. “The little hits at the Mohammedans and the Punjabis, the occasional criticisms, shrewd but friendly, of his officers, the references to Hindu customs, would have required the pen of a Kipling or a Morier to invent, and there is no reason to believe that Norgate possessed this.” Of course Cadell may be regarded as a prejudiced witness, and it is by no means unlikely that Sita Ram embroidered his narrative, and introduced as his own experiences he had been told round the camp fire. “Unfortunately in old age the memory often finds it hard to distinguish between things seen and things heard,” wrote Sir Charles Oman in his Wellington’s Army (Edward Arnold). “It is not uncommon to find a writer who represents himself as having been present at scenes where he cannot have been assisting, and still more frequent to detect him applying to one date perfectly genuine anecdotes which belong to another. One or two of the most readable narratives frankly mix up the sequence of events, with a note that the exact dating cannot be reconstructed.”

It is partly on account of Sita Ram's haziness about names and dates that his story rings true for me. He certainly could not have kept a diary from which to refresh his memory, nor is it likely that he wrote many letters, since most of those with whom he might have wished to correspond could not read. His chronology is often at fault; he mentions regiments as participating in a campaign at times when they are still in their peacetime garrisons, but he is correct in so far as they did take part at a later stage in the operations; he confuses the names of his British officers, but gets near enough to the vernacular rendering of the English to make it possible to trace many of them. Even his grouses and complaints ring true; they are those of an old soldier who is convinced that the “old days were the best days”. Surely most old soldiers think the same? However, there will continue to be doubts about the authenticity of Sita Ram's memoirs until more positive proof of their authorship can be established. I can only say that the longer I have studied them—and this study has extended over twenty years—the more convinced I have become that in essence they are true.

In editing this edition I have had to decide whether to leave Norgate's translation untouched or whether to render it more easily readable. I have decided for the latter. I have also cut out most of the Hindi expressions with which Norgate sprinkled his translation. Since Sita Ram's chronology is often at fault, and also because he rambles a great deal, I have been faced with the choice of either cutting and re-shaping the book completely, or leaving it more or less as it was originally written. I have chosen to leave it because I feel this best represents the way it was written in the original Hindi. Finally, I have had to decide whether or not there should be introductions for each chapter, and footnotes to expand on, or explain, references in the narrative. Although I do not care for footnotes myself, there are unlikely to be many readers who possess a detailed knowledge of British-Indian military history. For those who do, and who find my footnotes irritating glimpses of the obvious, I apologize for the annoyance I may have caused them. However, I hope my notes will be of use for the general reader, who may learn from them something of the Indian sepoys who served the British so faithfully in good times and in bad, and who played no small part in the making of modern India.

Mons, Belgium
J.D.L.