Anglo Nepalese War
Participants
- Francis Rawdon-Hastings, Earl of Moira — Governor-General, [[Calcutta_1814|Calcutta]] — no entity file
- Bhimsen Thapa — Mukhtiyar of Nepal, the war's real opponent — no entity file
- Major-General Rollo Gillespie — killed at Kalunga — no entity file
- Colonel David Ochterlony — the only British commander to succeed — no entity file
- Kaji Amar Singh Thapa — Nepali commander in the west — no entity file
- [[Colonel_Arthur_Blackwood]] — garrison commander, [[Fort_William]]
- [[Edward_Renwick]], [[James_Hatcherly]] — Bengal Engineers, whose corps the war competes for
- [[Valentine_Frome]] — 67th Bengal Native Infantry
- [[Thomas_Wyndham]] — British cavalry officer, in Calcutta as the army mobilises
Summary
In October 1814 the East India Company is eight weeks from invading Nepal, and every military resource in Bengal knows it.
The war is a border quarrel that both sides have allowed to become unanswerable. The Gorkha kingdom has spent forty-five years expanding out of its Himalayan heartland — west along the hills as far as the Sutlej, east into Sikkim, and south into the Terai lowlands where its claims collide directly with the Company’s revenue districts. The Company has spent those same decades acquiring Bengal, Awadh and Gorakhpur, and now finds a mountain state pressing on three hundred miles of its northern frontier and declining to be impressed by it.
The immediate cause is Butwal and Sheoraj: two disputed lowland districts that a Company commission awarded to the Company in 1814 and that Nepali troops declined to vacate. In May 1814 Nepali forces killed eighteen Company police officers at Butwal. Calcutta has been preparing for war since.
The declaration issues on 1 November 1814. It will take fifteen months, four separate invasion columns, two general officers’ reputations, one general officer’s life, and a great many more men to malaria than to musketry.
Context — what Calcutta looks like in October 1814
This is the part that matters at the table.
Governor-General Lord Moira — Francis Rawdon-Hastings, Earl of Moira, sixty, appointed 1813, a veteran soldier who intends to command in person and has been talked out of it. His attention through October is split between the diplomatic entertaining the season demands and a war he is about to start. He hosts the ball at Government House and he is thinking about the Terai while he does it.
Fort William is not quiet. Staff officers arriving and departing at all hours; the commissariat contracting for bullocks, grain and river transport on a scale the city notices in its prices; Bengal Native Infantry battalions marching north-west; and a constant traffic of surveyors, political officers and frontier intelligence men coming down from the hills with maps of country no European has drawn before.
The engineers are spoken for. The Bengal Engineers are a small corps and a war needs every sapper it has. Renwick’s embankment works and Hatcherly’s demolition expertise exist in a service that is about to want both men somewhere else.
Nobody thinks it will be difficult. The prevailing view in the Calcutta messes is that a hill state of two million cannot seriously resist the Company. This opinion will not survive December.
Participants
The Company
| Who | Role |
|---|---|
| Lord Moira (Francis Rawdon-Hastings) | Governor-General. Declared the war, planned the four-column strategy, and took the blame and eventually the credit. |
| Maj-Gen Rollo Gillespie | Commanded the Dehra Dun column. Famous, impatient, brave to the point of stupidity. Killed 31 October 1814 leading a fourth assault on the hill-fort of Kalunga. |
| Maj-Gen Bennet Marley | Commanded the column meant to march straight on Kathmandu. Achieved nothing, then abandoned his command and rode away from it in January 1815 — the war’s great scandal. |
| Maj-Gen John Sullivan Wood | Commanded the Gorakhpur column. Cautious to the point of paralysis. Achieved nothing. |
| Col. David Ochterlony | Commanded in the west against Amar Singh Thapa. Patient, methodical, willing to fight the mountains on their own terms. The only British commander of the war to succeed, and the man who ended it. |
| Colonel Arthur Blackwood | Garrison commander at Fort William during the mobilisation. Institutional, careful, and now very busy. |
Nepal
| Who | Role |
|---|---|
| King Girvan Yuddha Bikram Shah | Seventeen. Reigns; does not rule. |
| Bhimsen Thapa | Mukhtiyar — chief minister and the kingdom’s actual ruler. Built the army that fights this war and survived losing it. |
| Kaji Amar Singh Thapa | Commander in the western hills. Held the Sutlej line against Ochterlony for the better part of a year with no hope of reinforcement. |
| Balbhadra Kunwar | Defended Kalunga with roughly six hundred people, including women and children, against a force many times larger. Killed Gillespie. Held for a month under bombardment, then walked out through the British lines with what was left of his garrison rather than surrender. |
| Bhakti Thapa | Seventy-four years old at Malaun, where he led the last charge and was killed. The British buried him with honours. |
Outcome & Consequences
The campaign. Three of the four columns failed. Gillespie died in the first week. Marley and Wood accomplished nothing at all. Disease in the Terai killed far more Company soldiers than the Nepali army did. Only Ochterlony’s western campaign worked, and it worked slowly — outflanking hill positions rather than storming them — until Amar Singh Thapa surrendered Malaun in May 1815.
The peace. The Treaty of Sugauli was signed in December 1815, rejected, and only ratified on 4 March 1816 after Ochterlony marched a second time and reached Makwanpur, two days from Kathmandu.
The terms. Nepal ceded Sikkim, Kumaon, Garhwal and the western Terai — roughly a third of its territory — and accepted a British Resident at Kathmandu. Nepal was never colonised, which is the war’s other half: the border settled in 1816 is broadly the border today.
The unexpected consequence. The British were so impressed by the men who had fought them that they began recruiting them during the war. The Nasiri, Sirmoor and Kumaon battalions were raised in 1815 from Gorkhali prisoners and deserters. Those three units are the ancestors of every Gurkha regiment that follows.
Hooks
Relationships
- Located at Fort William — Commanded and supplied from the Bengal Presidency's military headquarters
- Located at Calcutta 1814 — The seat of government that declared it
- Involves Colonel Arthur Blackwood — Garrison commander during the mobilisation