Recent conversations and emails with my Chitradurga friends and acquaintances made me realize that little is known locally about the period when British soldiers and civilians lived there, mostly because so many of the relevant historical records are held far away in archives and libraries in New Delhi and the United Kingdom. My object here is to sketch a broad historical outline of the British experience at Chitradurga. I also try to explain why they came, why some of them settled in Chitradurga, and why most were gone by the 1830s.
The Madras Army’s withdrawal in the 1830s effectively ended the British community in Chitradurga. The last British marriages at Chitradurga were held in 1812 and there was about a 50 year gap between babies born in 1820 and the next batch of births in the 1870s. The cemetery continued to receive the occasional new grave into the 1870s, most of which were the remains of local civil administrators (e.g., a jailer and the head clerk of the district offices) and Christian missionaries.
The tables in this section list every British man, woman, and child for which I can find primary documentary evidence. The reader is advised that the people named represent only a small fraction of the British population who lived at various times in Chitradurga between the 1760s and the 1880s. We have the few names that we do because these people married, died, or were born or baptised in Chitradurga, all acts that left footprints in official records. The others, like most people, vanished namelessly into the past.
I cannot look at a .303 SMLE (Short, Magazine, Lee-Enfield) without having the stereotypical image of an Indian constable pop to mind — overweight, disillusioned, possibly a trifle dishonest, but often brave when it counts the most. If he’s armed, there’s a good chance that he carries a .303 SMLE. You may have seen him on the street, at the airport, railway station, so many places. In my mind’s eye, he treats his rifle as though it is unloaded; I also suspect that it wouldn’t pass a thorough arms inspection.
The constable’s SMLE was one of the 20th century’s outstanding military rifles and surely the one with the longest service record. Adopted by the British Army at the turn of the century, the .303 Lee-Enfield saw service in both world wars and countless conflicts around the world. During World War I alone, more than 2,000,000 SMLEs were made at the Royal Small Arms Factory at Enfield Lock, Middlesex (Reynolds 1960: 180). These rifles would eventually be manufactured at factories in England, India, Australia, and even a few in the United States. Production changed to the 7.62 cartridge in the 1960s, and the last Enfields were made in the early 1970s.
Between 1771 and 1818, East India Company (EIC) infantry, along with hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of soldiers around the world, carried the India Pattern musket into battle. Weighing around 10 lbs and firing a .76in caliber lead bullet that left the barrel at roughly 2,425 foot-pounds of energy, it had a maximum effective range of about 200 yards (Harding 1999a: xiv, 380-381). For all this, it wasn’t the perfect flintlock musket. A knowledgeable critic probably wouldn’t call it aesthetically pleasing or of high quality. Nevertheless, like all widely adopted smallarms, it was good enough. And just being good enough turns out to be pretty impressive when one considers the war records of EIC and British armies armed with this weapon.
My background research for the Mysore hill forts article (see Lewis 2012) required that I learn about the early 19th century arms and equipment of the East India Company’s (EIC) army. This work soon broadened to include several of the more common smallarms of the Indian Army, which is the direct descendant of the EIC army (Menezes 1999).
As I studied what the Indian infantryman carried into battle over the past few centuries, two weapons stood out, the India Pattern musket and the .303 Lee-Enfield. Both were in service for a half century or more; both were important British Army weapons and were used by armies elsewhere in the British Empire; and hundreds of thousands of both weapons were issued to Indian soldiers. In short, the India Pattern musket and the .303 Lee-Enfield, more than any other smallarms, played significant roles in recent Indian military history.
