The main purpose of British officers’ writings was to validate the illegal British rule
Farooque Sargani
In the colonial era, the main purpose of British officers’ writings was to validate their illegal rule, because colonists with their military might and conspiracies established their empire and tried to prove that they had the right to rule and they are civilized than the native people of Sindh.
I was shocked when I went through the writings of Edward Said. According to him, “If you look at some of the writings about India in England from the middle to the end of the 19th century, you would realize that India existed only to be ruled by England.”
On the contrary, everyone knows that the Britain with their military might and cunning approaches built up their empire all over the world.
Many British officers served in Sindh and wrote their memoirs and diaries, but I would like to discuss here a few officers who were particularly appointed in the Thar and Parker region of Sindh and specially appointed to crush the Hur insurgency and maintain the law and order. There were many officers, who were brilliant writers and military men, including William Henry Lucas, Deputy Commissioner Tharparkar, Edmond C. Cox Bart, Frederick Young, Hugh Trevor Lambrick, and many others, but I have read the books of Edmund Cox Bart, Philip Mason, and the diary of Lambrick and analyzed their notes. They never wrote the truth in their writings.
Sir Edmund Cox Bart, the first Deputy Inspector General of Police for Sindh, in his book ‘My Thirty Years in India’, admits ‘Putting the fear of God and of the British Raj into the sympathizers with the movement.’ That kind of situation during colonial era was explained by Franz Fanon, who wrote, “The colonizer inculcates the violence in the minds of indigenous people and destroys their identity and culture.”
The colonists not only tortured the Hurs but anyone who lived in the region of Thar and Parker, extended up to Jodhpur and Rajputana. The native Zamindars also supported the British Raj and also provided arms, money, and their people to colonists to end the Hur insurrection. On the next page, Cox Bart wrote, “We soon had a crowd of police and Zamindars around us.”
That is why Hurs killed native Zamindars. It is a common rule all around the world that those who betrayed their people and motherland and supported invaders for their benefits, must be killed.
Another officer was Philip Mason, who wrote his famous book series “The Men Who Ruled India,” in which he argued that the British, especially Hugh Trevor Lambrick, did a good job of rooting out the Hur movement. He writes: “The first thing Lambrick decided was to restore police morale and end the defeatism of the villagers who were not Hurs. To do this, he must get the police out of their police stations and lead them to the attack.” He had never written any single line on the cruel nature of Lambrick. In fact, he had written with a colonial perspective and totally rejected the contribution of indigenous people. Moreover, Mason, precisely mentions the cruel and ruthless colonist officers in his book.
All the writings of the British officers in Sindh supported the colonists’ ideas, and were the part of propaganda against the local people and disrespect to the human norms and values of indigenous people for the natural resources and power.
Read: Hur women of Sindh fought guerrilla war against the British
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Farooque Ahmed Sargani is a student of History and Archaeology at the University of Karachi. He published several articles on History, Archaeology, Politics, Climate Change, Feudalism, and Capitalism. He has presented his research at various international conferences in the country. He is specializing in Colonial History, and currently researching the anti-colonial movement, the Hur Resistance Movement in Sindh (1888–1952), a critical study of Indigenous uprisings against colonial rule.
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