17 February in military history: Battle of Miani, 1843

17 February 1843 · 183 years ago

A quarrel turned into a war

Sindh, the lower Indus valley, was ruled by the Talpur Amirs, and by the early 1840s the East India Company had long been pressing on it. The Company sent General Charles Napier to deal with the Amirs. The Royal Collection Trust's catalog calls the rising he was meant to forestall an imagined one, and the historian Edward Rice describes Napier as goading the Amirs into war.¹

Fighting broke out in mid-February 1843, and Napier marched against the Amirs' army near Hyderabad. On 17 February he found it drawn up at Miani, about six miles from the city, behind the high bank of the Fuleli, a river channel whose bed was then dry. Ali Murad of Khairpur, a rival of his elder brother Mir Rustam, stayed on the British side.²

The fight at the riverbank

The numbers are uncertain. Napier reported about 2,800 men of all arms and twelve guns, and Edward Rice gives the same 2,800, while the Royal Collection Trust says about 3,000. The core of Napier's force was one British regiment, the 22nd (Cheshire) Regiment of Foot, with several units of Indian soldiers. Napier put the Talpur army at 22,000 men, a figure Rice repeats, while the Royal Collection Trust's catalog gives 8,000.³

The Talpur army was made up largely of Baluch warriors armed with matchlocks, swords and shields, with a large body of horsemen. Wave after wave charged the British line along the bank and was cut down by musket, bayonet and artillery fire. In the end the Talpur army broke, and the Amirs gave themselves up.⁴

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 catalog gives about 5,000 Talpur dead and British casualties of about 260, and Edward Rice about 6,000 Talpur dead or wounded.⁵

Hyderabad surrendered and was in British hands within days. On 24 March 1843 Napier defeated a second Talpur army under Mir Sher Muhammad at Dubba, near Hyderabad. Sindh was then annexed to British India.⁶

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 Edward Rice describes the word as the caption of a cartoon in the humor magazine Punch.⁷

The joke stuck because many in Britain thought the conquest really was a sin: Napier had been sent to stop a rising, not to take the whole province. 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.⁸