Iron in the soul

‘I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion’, said Winston Churchill as prime minister in 1942, to his secretary of state for India, Leo Amery.

Like John Nicholson, Churchill had soldiered on the subcontinent as a young man, and both men saw fighting on the North-West Frontier. Nicholson was a career officer in the East India Company army. ‘I dislike India and its inhabitants,’ he said as a young man, and never changed that opinion. Duty, obligation and a career kept both men in a country they loathed; the graves of more than two million Britons in India demonstrate that it was not simply a place to get rich in, but a place, too often, to die in at an early age.

Nicholson was a fundamentalist evangelical Protestant from Ulster, the descendant of lowland Scots immigrants. His mother was a widow and he had many siblings. ‘If I could earn £200 a year there, I would come back to Ulster,’ he wrote to his mother. But he couldn’t. He remitted £100 of his salary back home to help with his brother’s education. He was captured during the first Afghan War and was treated brutally, enduring the terrible experience of being the first to discover his brother Alexander’s body, murdered and mutilated, the genitals severed and placed in the mouth. After Afghanistan, the iron entered Nicholson’s soul. He never trusted or believed any Indian ever again.

He was certainly brave and dashing, and was revered and admired by his men; but he was disliked for his arrogance and sneering contempt by many of his fellow officers. Nicholson believed that India was a barbarous land and that God had called upon the British to civilise it by forcibly stamping out crime and disorder.