'Too Good a Plum': Lord Dalhousie Picked Off Indian States for Eight Years. Fourteen Months After He Left, the Revolt Began

In January 1854 Lord Dalhousie was in Rangoon, in newly conquered Burma, when word came that the Raja of Nagpur was dead. He wrote at once to his oldest friend, Sir George Couper.

“I think I shall swallow it,” he wrote. “He has left no son, no heir, and made no adoption. And it would give us £400,000 a-year. I think this is too good a ‘plum’ not to pick out of this ‘Christmas pie.’”

By late February his government had “resolved to retain the territory of Nagpore as a lapsed state,” which he told Couper was “very valuable to us from its cotton capabilities.”

James Andrew Broun-Ramsay, Marquess of Dalhousie, was 35 when he landed at Calcutta as Governor-General on 12 January 1848. He handed over to Lord Canning on 29 February 1856. In between, by his admiring biographer W. W. Hunter’s count, the East India Company added nearly a quarter of a million square miles. On 10 May 1857, fourteen months after he left, the Company’s Indian soldiers, the sepoys, rose at Meerut.

A rule about adopted sons

Dalhousie is remembered for the Doctrine of Lapse. A Hindu ruler with no son could adopt one, and the historian R. C. Majumdar notes that the right was “universally regarded in India” as sacred, “sanctioned by immemorial custom”. The Company, as the paramount power over its dependent states, claimed that such an adoption needed its consent. Refuse consent, and the adopted boy kept the family’s private property while the throne passed to the Company.

The first case came three months after he arrived. The Raja of Satara, of Shivaji’s line, had asked permission to adopt and been refused. In 1848, in the last hours of his life, he adopted a son anyway.

Even Hunter concedes that this raja “governed well.” Dalhousie would not hand the state to “a boy brought up in obscurity, selected for adoption almost by chance.” The Court of Directors, the Company’s governing board in London, agreed that the state “cannot pass to an adopted heir without the consent of the Paramount Power,” and that the Company’s interests “are best consulted by withholding it.”

Seven states in six years

After Satara, Jaitpur in Bundelkhand passed to the Company in 1849 when its ruler, a claimant the British had put on the throne, died without issue. Sambalpur, now in Odisha, was “annexed as an escheat” the same year, an escheat being land that reverts to the overlord when no heir is left. Baghat, one of the Simla hill states and 36 square miles in all, escheated in 1849 by the Imperial Gazetteer’s date, 1850 in most modern lists. Udaipur, a small forest state in the Surguja group (not the Rajput city), went in 1852 on a different ground: its chief and his two brothers had been convicted of manslaughter.

Then Jhansi. Raja Gangadhar Rao died childless in 1853 after adopting a son. Dalhousie wrote that the government “should refuse to recognise the adoption, and should take possession of Jhansi as an escheat.” The Rani’s story begins there.

Then Nagpur, the plum, whose dead raja Dalhousie’s minute called “a seller of justice, a drunkard, and a debauchee.” The Victorian historian John Kaye, quoted by both S. N. Sen and Majumdar, described what followed: the royal elephants, horses and bullocks “sold off at the price of carrion,” the jewels “sent to the Calcutta market,” and the aged Banka Bai threatening “to fire the palace if the furniture were removed.” Kaye had heard it said that the seizures and sales “created a worse impression” in the region “than the seizure of the kingdom itself."

"He did not invent it”

The strongest defence of Dalhousie is Hunter’s, from 1890: “Lord Dalhousie did not invent the Doctrine of Lapse.” It is true, as far as it goes. The Government of India had laid down the rule in 1841, and London had applied it before he arrived. The line he drew, Sen explains, ran between states “that were not British creations, and states like Satara and Jhansi that were.”

Hunter’s own book supplies the answer. “In uniformly enforcing this principle,” he admits, Dalhousie “unquestionably advanced a step beyond his predecessors.” When the Rajput state of Karauli lost its heir in 1852, Dalhousie thought the arguments seemed “to preponderate in favour of causing Karauli to lapse.” London overruled him, and Karauli survived under its own chief.

His private letters to Couper, with their plums and pies, point the same way. Majumdar’s verdict on the policy was four words long: “famous or rather infamous”.

A Peshwa’s son and an emperor’s title

The same logic went after pensions. Baji Rao II, the last Peshwa and head of the old Maratha power, had surrendered in 1818 for £80,000 a year. When he died in 1851, his adopted son Nana Sahib asked for it to continue. The Company said no.

Hunter’s defence is that it was always a life pension and that Nana inherited £280,000. But Hunter also quotes Sir John Malcolm, who arranged the deal, justifying it because more war “would have cost more than the value of the life pension.” The money was the price of a kingdom. Nana sent an agent, Azimullah Khan, to London to plead for it.

When the Nawab of the Carnatic died childless in 1855, Dalhousie called the treaty behind his title “a purely personal treaty,” and the title went into abeyance. The house of Tanjore followed. In 1849 he announced that after Bahadur Shah Zafar died, the Mughal family would be moved out of the Red Fort. He also proposed ending the imperial title, which London deferred until the old emperor died. Majumdar concludes that Dalhousie “finally extinguished three of the great historic royal Maratha families.”

The Punjab: war “with a vengeance”

The Punjab was taken by conquest. After two British officers were murdered at Multan in April 1848, “There is no other course open to us,” Dalhousie wrote to the Company’s Secret Committee, “but to prepare for a general Punjab War, and ultimately to occupy the country.” On 5 October he told a military ball at Barrackpur: “If our enemies want war, war they shall have, and with a vengeance.”

After battles at Chillianwala on 13 January 1849 and Gujrat on 21 February, the Punjab was annexed on 29 March. Sen points out that its Maharaja, Duleep Singh, was “in fact a ward of the East India Company” and not responsible for the Multan rising. The Wallace Collection records that the “ten-year-old maharaja had to relinquish all rights for himself and his heirs,” in return for a pension of between £40,000 and £50,000 a year. The Koh-i-Noor left Lahore in the same settlement.

A cherry called Awadh

From Simla on 30 July 1851, Dalhousie wrote to Couper about Awadh’s king: “The wretch at Lucknow, who sent his crown to the Exhibition, would have done his people and us a good service if he had sent his head in it, and he never would have missed it. That is a cherry which will drop into our mouths some day.”

Since 1801 a subsidiary alliance had made Awadh’s Nawab disband his army and accept British troops and a British Resident, the Governor-General’s representative, at his court. With Wajid Ali Shah alive, lapse could not apply, so the charge was misgovernment.

Oddly, his formal minute advised against outright annexation. The king would keep his title and the Company would govern, with power “perpetual in duration, as well as ample in extent.” London ordered the harsher course, and Sen says the Board of Control and the Court of Directors “should also share the responsibility.” Dalhousie’s appetite is on the record all the same. In June 1855, five months before London’s final order, he told Couper he was “trussing up the Kingdom of Oude preparatory to putting it on the spit.”

On 4 February 1856 the Resident handed Wajid Ali Shah Dalhousie’s demand that he abdicate and sign over his government by treaty. The king, Majumdar records, took off his turban and placed it in the Resident’s hands, and refused to sign. Dalhousie wrote to Couper that “our gracious Queen has 5,000,000 more subjects and £1,300,000 more revenue than she had yesterday.”

Rails, wires and cotton

Hunter calls Dalhousie “the father alike of the Railway and of the Telegraph in India.” His Railway Minute of 1853 was frank about whom the lines would serve: “England is calling aloud for the cotton which India does already produce.” The first stretch of the Great Indian Peninsular Railway opened as far as Thana that same year. Hunter records that grain exports more than tripled in his time, from £890,000 in 1848 to £2,900,000 in 1856. He offered the lines to private companies raising English capital under a state guarantee, a bargain India ended up paying for twice.

The other purpose was military, and Hunter does not hide it. The railways, he writes, would “consolidate the newly-annexed territories” and “immensely increase the striking power” of the army, and he is plain about the result: “The railway and the telegraph were worth thousands of men to us in the Mutiny of 1857.”

Fourteen months later

Wajid Ali Shah was exiled to Calcutta and lived out his life at Metiabruz. He was “widely loved,” the NCERT textbook records, and people followed him as far as Kanpur singing songs of lament.

Awadh was also, the same textbook notes, “the nursery of the Bengal Army,” because so many sepoys came from its villages. Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, introducing Sen’s official history in 1957, had “little doubt” that the annexation of 1856 “marked the beginning of a rebellious mood in the army.”

When the revolt came, the dispossessed were at its head, sometimes, by the NCERT account, because the sepoys and townspeople gave them no choice. At Kanpur, Nana Sahib drove out the British garrison and proclaimed himself Peshwa. In Lucknow, Wajid Ali Shah’s son Birjis Qadr was proclaimed Nawab, and his mother Begum Hazrat Mahal helped organise the rising. The Rani fought at Jhansi. The Sambalpur family, in Sen’s words, “rose in arms.” Udaipur’s deposed chief and his brothers came back and set up a short-lived rule. At Satara the authorities uncovered a plot to restore Maratha power.

Sen quotes a contemporary, Hedayet Ali, on what people said about Awadh: “if the British Government dethrones a king who has ever been so faithful to them, what independent nawab or rajah is safe?”

How much was his doing

Historians weigh his share differently. Azad called his annexations “perhaps the decisive factor.” Sen is more careful. “Lord Dalhousie has generally been held responsible for the outbreak, but no single act of his by itself would have caused the revolt,” he writes, and he spreads the blame across the governors-general before him. The spark itself, the greased cartridges, is a separate story. On Awadh, though, he is blunt: “If there was still a vestige of lingering faith in British fairness, the annexation of Oudh in 1856 completely removed it.”

Majumdar called it “the most tyrannical act of Dalhousie,” and pointed to the land as well. An Inam Commission set up in 1852 to check land titles confiscated “more than twenty thousand estates in the Deccan” in the five years before the revolt.

After 1858, with the Company abolished and the Crown in charge, India’s ruling chiefs were promised that their territory would never be annexed again. They could pass their kingdoms to their heirs, “including adopted sons.” In 1860 Baghat, all 36 square miles of it, was restored.