Question

Features of bheel revolt(1819)

Answer 1

The Smiths were a prosperous farming family in Brockenhurst in the New Forest, based in a property called Careys, when in the  1790s Robert Smith married Alice Bowden. They had four sons (Nathaniel, Richard, Henry and David) who all had Bowden as an additional forename. Moreover all their children, of whatever gender, were given this same forename, as were the next generation. As the 19th Century progressed some of the family hyphenated the name, and so Bowden-Smith became the accepted usage, and it is that form I will adopt in this story.
 
Of the four sons Nathaniel, the eldest, inherited Careys, while Richard moved to a property called Vernalls in nearby Lyndhurst. David I have not been able to trace, but Henry joined the East India Company’s Bengal Army, and by 1833 he was a Captain in the 37th Regiment of the Bengal Native Infantry. This had only become a separate regiment in 1824, and was later to become one of the regiments which mutinied at Benares in 1857. Bowden-Smith was destined not to be around to witness that.
 
The Background

The Bheels are a tribe of central India, mainly in Rajastan and Mahayal Pradesh, who traditionally had a reputation as warriors and effective guerrilla-style fighters. Under the Moghul Emperors they were apparently relatively peaceful hunter-gatherers, but facing persecution under the Mahrattas they took to the jungles and became less acquiescent to authority. When in 1818 the British organised the princely states of Central India into the Central India Agency, centred on the town of Neemuch (now in north-west Madhayal Pradesh, close to the border with Rajastan), they attempted to bring the Bheels to heel, but without success. Therefore in 1825 a Bheel Agency was created, specifically to deal with the tribe, and a Bheel Corps was formed, in an attempt to quell the less co-operative tribesmen. Their success can be judged from the fact that when Captain Henry Bowden-Smith died at Neemuch in 1833 it was of “wounds received in action against the Bheels”. As nomadic hunters operating in thick jungle the regimented British forces clearly found them difficult to overcome. The operations of the British in India focus on the large conflicts, so that we know about Hastings and Tippoo Sultan, Wellesley and the Sikh wars, and Afghanistan and the Mutiny, but all the time, behind the headline-grabbing campaigns, was the continual attrition of the little conflicts, like that against the Bheels.
 
The Bheels' main objection was similar to that of nomadic hunter-gatherers anywhere in the colonised world, whether it be Apache or Sioux in America, Bushmen in South Africa, aborigines in Australia, lost tribes in contemporary Amazon; how can their lifestyle be compatible with a Western model of land ownership, which says they can no longer hunt and gather as they did formerly. The British wanted the Bheel to come out of the jungles and settle down as pastoral farmers; many of the Bheel did not want to do this, and so adopted a guerrilla war which lasted for over twenty years.