On 17 February 1843 an East India Company army under General Charles Napier defeated the army of the Talpur Amirs of Sindh at Miani, near Hyderabad in what is now Pakistan. Napier's small force of British and Indian troops held the bank of a dry canal and broke charge after charge by Baluch warriors with musket and artillery fire. A second victory near Hyderabad in March completed the conquest, and Sindh was annexed to British India. The one-word dispatch “Peccavi” that Napier is supposed to have sent afterward was a later joke, not a real message.
A quarrel turned into a war
After the disastrous First Anglo-Afghan War of 1839 to 1842, British India looked hard at Sindh, the lower Indus valley ruled by the Talpur Amirs. The governor-general, Lord Ellenborough, favored annexation, and in 1842 Napier was sent to Sindh with full civil and military powers. He forced a harsh new treaty on the Amirs. The Royal Collection Trust's catalogue describes the rising he had been sent to forestall as an imagined one.1
A popular rising followed, and Napier marched on Hyderabad, the Talpur capital. On 17 February he found the Amirs' army drawn up at Miani, near the city, behind the banks of the Fuleli, a canal whose bed was then dry. It was commanded by Mir Nasir Khan Talpur. Ali Murad of Khairpur, a rival of his elder brother Mir Rustam, stayed on the British side.2
The fight at the canal
The numbers are uncertain. Napier reported about 2,800 men of all arms and twelve guns, the figure Britannica also gives, while the Royal Collection Trust says about 3,000. Its core was one British regiment, the 22nd (Cheshire) Regiment of Foot, with several units of Indian soldiers. Estimates of the Talpur army run from about 8,000 men, the figure in the Royal Collection Trust's catalogue, to more than 20,000 in Britannica and the 22,000 that Napier reported.3
The Talpur army was made up largely of Baluch warriors armed with matchlocks, swords and shields, with a large body of horsemen and, by Napier's count, fifteen guns. Wave after wave charged the British line along the bank and was cut down by musket, bayonet and artillery fire. The fighting at the bank was hand to hand and lasted, Napier wrote, three hours or more. In the end the Talpur army broke and scattered, and all its artillery was taken.4
The best-known picture of the battle, Edward Armitage's huge canvas in the Royal Collection, shows men of the 22nd charging a mass of Baluch warriors in the dry bed of the Fuleli. According to the Royal Collection Trust, Queen Victoria bought it in 1847, and Napier complained that the painter had placed him behind his troops when he had been in front the whole time.5
The cost and the conquest
The casualty figures are disputed. Napier's dispatch gave British losses of 256 killed and wounded and said the enemy was generally supposed to have lost 5,000 men. The Royal Collection Trust's catalogue gives about 5,000 Talpur dead and British casualties of about 260, and the historian Edward Rice about 6,000 Talpur dead or wounded.6
Hyderabad fell two days after the battle. On 24 March 1843 Napier defeated a second Talpur army under Mir Sher Muhammad Khan at Dubba, near Hyderabad. Sindh, except the lands of Ali Murad of Khairpur, was annexed and attached to the Company's Bombay Presidency. Napier stayed in India until 1847.7
The pun Napier never sent
In Britain, Miani is best remembered for a joke. Napier was said to have reported his conquest in a single Latin word, “Peccavi”, meaning “I have sinned”, a pun on “I have Sindh”. Euronews says that Napier never sent such a message and traces it to the humor magazine Punch, which printed it on 18 May 1844; Edward Rice also describes the word as the caption of a Punch cartoon. According to Euronews, the pun was the idea of Catherine Winkworth, a teenage Englishwoman who later became a hymn writer, and who sent it in to Punch.8
The joke stuck because many in Britain thought the conquest really was a sin. Napier's orders had been to put down a rising, not to take the whole province, and the Company's directors pronounced the war uncalled-for, impolitic and unjust. According to the historian Edward Rice, Napier himself had said that the British had no right to seize Sindh but would do so, and that it would be “a very advantageous, useful and humane piece of rascality”. The Company's next wars on the Indus, against the Sikh kingdom of the Punjab, are the subject of our article on Chillianwala, and the wider story is in our guide to the battles of India.9
Also on this day
- 1855: Battle of Eupatoria. Russian forces attacked the Crimean port of Eupatoria, held mainly by Ottoman troops allied with Britain and France, during the Crimean War.
