But Calcutta’s sepoy encampment was special in one important respect: it was far bigger than most others. The bazar that was attached to it was a vast, permanent establishment, a town in itself — its offerings were so varied that a young jawan could spend months there without wishing to venture out.
Left to himself, Kesri would have liked to return to the bazar at the Sepoy Lines, but it was out of the question this time, for he was under strict orders not to step out of Fort William. The formation of the expeditionary force was still a secret because no formal orders had yet been received from London: to keep word from leaking out, it had been decided that the volunteers would be confined to the precincts of the fort.
Kesri had grumbled when he was first told that he could not leave Fort William. But once installed in his new lodgings he found the confinement less irksome than he had expected. His quarters were in a barracks, which was itself a new experience, and being among the first to move in, he was able to commandeer one of the best rooms for himself. It occupied a corner of the building and had big windows on two sides; it was also on the third floor which added to the novelty, for Kesri had never before lived so high off the ground or enjoyed such a good view of his surroundings.
On the other hand it was burdensome to be constantly on duty. In most bases and cantonments there was a comfortable division between the sepoys’ military duties and their living arrangements: at the end of the day, when they returned to their living quarters, they would change into dhotis and vests. At Fort William, by contrast, sepoys had to be in uniform all through the day, just like every English swaddy, and this took some getting used to. But still, these arrangements were not without their advantages: it was good to be spared the trouble and expense of dealing with a servant and managing a household.
The barracks that had been allotted to the Bengal Volunteers were in a secluded corner of the fort. Only a small part of the building had been set aside for them since their unit was to be a ‘battalion’ only in name. Even at full strength their numbers would be less than half that of a regular paltan: it would consist of two companies, each of about a hundred men.
That the unit would be a small one was welcome news to Kesri: he had expected to have jemadars, and perhaps even a subedar, sitting on top of him, poking their noses into everything. He was delighted to find that he was to be the highest ranking NCO in B Company. Equally pleasing was the discovery that the commander of the battalion, one Major Bolton, was a kind of supernumerary officer who was likely to be appointed to the staff of the expedition’s commanding officer. This meant that the battalion’s two companies would effectively function as independent units, which was exactly as Kesri would have wished it to be, since it meant that he and Captain Mee would be left largely to themselves in dealing with their men. There was of course the minor matter of some half-dozen subalterns to consider, but Kesri did not doubt that Captain Mee would be able to keep these young English officers from making nuisances of themselves.
It turned out that Captain Mee’s counterpart, the commander of A Company, was not a particularly energetic or forceful officer. The advantages of this became obvious when it came time to pick out the junior NCOs: with Captain Mee’s help, Kesri was able to get exactly the men he wanted as his naiks and lance-naiks.
When the first groups of rank-and-file sepoys began to trickle in, they too exceeded Kesri’s expectations. He knew from experience that soldiers who were allowed to ‘volunteer’ for overseas service were often rejects of one sort or another — misfits, shirkers, layabouts and drunks — men that any unit would be glad to get rid of. But these balamteers were not quite as bad as Kesri had feared: many of them were ambitious young jawans who wanted to see the world and get ahead, just as he once had himself, many years before.
Still, there was no getting around the fact that the volunteers were young and inexperienced soldiers, drawn from regiments of uneven standard. Kesri knew that it would be no easy task to mould this rag-tag bunch into a coherent fighting unit.
But once drills began in earnest, Kesri discovered that there were some advantages to working with a motley crowd of bala-mteers: since these men were not related to each other, as in a regular sepoy battalion, there were no meddlesome cousins and uncles to be taken into account. They could be harassed, ghabraoed and punished at will, without having to answer to their relatives. It was exhilarating to taste the power that came with this — it was as if Kesri had become a zamindar and a subedar all at once.
In the past Kesri had often been awed by the iron discipline of European regiments. He had wondered what it was that enabled their NCOs to mould their men into machines. He understood now that the first step in building units of that kind was to strip the men of their links to the world beyond. In the regular Bengal Native Infantry it was impossible to do this; the ties between the men and their communities were just too strong.
It was a help also that here they were all living in unfamiliar conditions. None of the sepoys had ever been quartered in barracks before, and Kesri was much struck by the difference. He himself was now sharing a room with four naiks, and within a week he felt he knew them better than he had ever known his subordinates. They were from different places — Awadh, Mithila, Bhojpur and the mountains — and of different castes as welclass="underline" Brahmin, Rajput, Aheer, Kurmi and a few others. At the start some of them grumbled about eating together, but Kesri was quick to dhamkao the complaints out of them. Didn’t they know that they would have to travel on transport ships? Didn’t they understand that on ships it was impossible to carry on as if they were back in a village? And so on. It wasn’t long before they forgot about their complaints and this had a salutary effect also on the jawans, who became much more amenable to messing together when they saw that the NCOs were doing it too.
For a while things went better than Kesri had expected but he knew it wouldn’t last — and indeed it didn’t. Soon enough, the enforced isolation began to take a toll. The men were unused to being cooped up in a place where they had no access to the varied amenities of a camp-followers’ bazar. Living with strangers, in barracks’ rooms, and being constantly in uniform made them uneasy as well.
Matters took a turn for the worse when the second lot of bala-mteers was sent in, to make up the company’s numbers. Almost to a man they were ‘undesirables’, who had been induced to volunteer because their parent units wanted to be rid of them — either because they were physically unfit or because they were incorrigible troublemakers.
Soon nerves began to fray and since there were no cousins and uncles around to intervene before quarrels got out of hand, petty disagreements frequently escalated into fights. On two successive weeks a man was stabbed to death, which meant that the company lost a total of nine men altogether, because the killers’ accomplices had to be dismissed as well.
As the weeks went by Kesri began to see more and more signs of faltering morale: dishevelled uniforms, disorderly drills and many instances of mute, mulish insubordination of the kind that could not be remedied with ordinary punishments. To keep the men in hand became a constant struggle: for the first time in his career Kesri began to regret that flogging had been abolished in the Bengal Native Infantry.