The Bayonet Charge: How the British Army Conquered India

While it is true that European colonial expansion in Africa and Asia in the Victorian era (1837-1901) can largely be attributed to superior military technology—perhaps best summarized in the British writer Hilaire Beloc’s well-known axiom: “Whatever happens, we have got/ The Maxim gun, and they have not”—the swift British conquest of the Indian subcontinent in the 18th and the first half of the 19th century was made possible not so much by superior firepower, but literally by the sword, i.e., the bayonet.

A determined charge of well-disciplined British or European-trained Indian soldiers with bayonets fixed on their muskets in massed formation was perhaps the single most important tactical factor in deciding the outcome of battles up until the Indian Rebellion of 1857, when superior firepower made a charge with cold steel less important. By 1857, however, the British had already conquered the most powerful states on the subcontinent and subjugated their fiercest opponents. Therefore, it is fair to say that a triangular-bladed socket knife, rather than British guns and superior British military technology, conquered India.

Indeed, it was because British forces were often outgunned by, and numerically inferior to, their Indian adversaries that they had to find a way to neutralize the enemy’s superior firepower and technology. At the time, Indian rulers imported modern Dutch and French guns, but also manufactured cannons themselves. While Indians were not “able to manufacture cannon using the Maritz principle (in which a cast barrel was precision lathed to drill out the bore), their older ‘cast on’ construction method (with the barrel cast around an inner mould that produced the bore) nonetheless made some excellent guns,” the historian Richard Holmes notes in his book Sahib: The British Soldier in India. Many Indian principalities also hired European military instructors and mercenaries to teach their soldiers modern European artillery tactics.

During many decisive engagements in the 18th and first half of the 19th century, Indian armies were able to deploy superior firepower. For example, during the Battle of Plassey in 1757, the British East India Company fielded eight cannons, whereas the Mughal Empire went into the fight with 53 artillery pieces, the majority of superior caliber to the British guns. When the city of Seringapatam fell in 1799, during the Fourth Anglo-Mysore War, more than 900 canons were captured by the British East India Company while the British forces and their allies had less than a hundred.

The most formidable enemy that the British encountered during the 19th century was the Sikh Empire. It was their artillery in particular that made the Sikhs such a dangerous enemy. By the time the first Anglo-Sikh War broke out in 1845, the Sikhs were able to field 250 modern artillery pieces. “Sikh artillery was formidable, its accurate and unremitting fire a grim feature of both Sikh Wars,” according to Holmes. Indeed, the Battle of Chillianwala during the Second Anglo-Sikh War was the bloodiest battle fought in the history of the British East India Company. Most British casualties occurred during a head-on assault of British infantry against Sikh guns. The well-trained Sikh gunners fired grapeshot at the attackers and held their position. The British infantry had to halt its attack and retreat.

Nevertheless, despite the occasional defeat, the bayonet charge was seen as the best tactic to overcome the enemy’s superior firepower. (Both sides usually were equipped with similar smoothbore muskets, offsetting any advantage that this could deliver in a fight.) It was also seen as a good way to compensate for inferior numbers and, more importantly, by preferring the attack to defense, it contributed to the martial prestige of the British soldier in India. (Officers of all European armies believed in the use of massed infantry formations and the bayonet as the key to victory in battle throughout the 19th and early 20th century.) Indeed, the principle of attacking an enemy without delay and defeating him in close quarters became enshrined in British colonial warfare doctrine in the 19th century. “It has become an axiom sanctified by time, and justified by a hundred victories, for a British force, however small, always to take upon itself the role of the attacking party. From the battle of Plassey downwards this bold initiative has almost invariably brought success,” the British officer G.J. Younghusband wrote in Indian Frontier Warfare in 1898.

Holmes explains further:

The ‘strike first’ principle committed the British to attacking, and the quality of Indian artillery generally meant that a sustained firefight was not in their interests. Accordingly, their infantry, both British and sepoy, usually advanced in column, to make it easier to move cross-country, then shook out into line within a few hundred yards of the enemy, and then pushed forward, perhaps stopping to fire a volley or two but, increasingly, being encouraged to ‘come at them with the bayonet.’

Moreover, he adds:

The advance under fire with fixed bayonets was the hallmark of British infantrymen fighting in India: the ultimate pay-off for hauling him halfway across the world, and arriving on the enemy position, sweaty, powder-grimed and murderous; but it often decided matters.

In comparison to warfare in Europe, where bayonet fights were rare at the time, Indian troops often stood their ground and British soldiers and their allies had to engage them in hand-to-hand combat.  At such moments, Indian infantry usually threw down their muskets and bayonets and engaged the enemy with swords. Even European-trained Sikh soldiers reverted to the tulwar, a saber, in such circumstances, according to eyewitness accounts.

It was the introduction of the Enfield Pattern 1853 rifle-musket in 1856 that slowly tilted the technological advantage in favor of the British during the second half of the 19th century. (The introduction of the Enfield rifle-musket contributed to the Indian rebellion of 1857 when rumors spread that the cartridges for the new weapon were greased with beef-tallow, among other things.) At the beginning of the Indian rebellion, a British officer decided that he had to attack quickly because he was “losing men fast” due to superior Indian fire, as Holmes recounts in Sahib, and another officer observed that he had “never seen such splendid artillery as theirs was. They had the range to a yard and every shot told.” However, the situation was markedly different a few weeks later with the arrival of new artillery from England and new regiments outfitted with the Enfield rifle-musket.

The British officer Henry Havelock, in a letter to his wife, described an engagement near Fatehpur on July 12, 1857:

Twelve British soldiers were struck down by the sun, and never rose again. But our fight was fought, neither with musket nor bayonet, nor with saber, but with Enfield rifles and cannon; so we lost no men. The enemy’s fire scarcely touched us; ours, for four hours, allowed him no repose.

He attributed victory on that day to “the fire of the British artillery, exceeding in rapidity and precision all that the Brigadier has ever witnessed in his not so short career” and “the power of the Enfield rifle in British hands.” It is easy to understand why the Enfield had such a huge impact: The effective range of a musket was around 200 yards, whereas the new Enfield rifle-musket could hit targets up to 1,000 yards away.

Of course, there were instances in the second half of the 19th century were British troops were outgunned by their opponents during military campaigns, for example, during the Battle of Maiwand in 1880 during the Second Anglo-Afghan War. But by and large, it was superior British firepower that guaranteed victory in battle not just against Indian insurgents, but also rebels in other parts of the British Empire. At the Battle of Omdurman in September 1898, British imperial forces killed 12,000 followers of the self-proclaimed Mahdi outside of Khartoum, in central Sudan, while the British force only suffered 47 killed in action.

For the first hundred years of British rule in India, however, when Britain was expanding most aggressively on the subcontinent, it was the bayonet charge conducted by a massed phalanx of British infantry that ultimately was the guarantor of battlefield success.