Arms and the mercenary

For the Location Finder, please check the end of this post. 

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Death is an oddly optimistic state of being—as true of prince as it is for pauper. There’s no small trust in leaving the reality of a physical body for the promise of life beyond. And no small measure of faith in trusting that that physical body be laid to rest with dignity and—if buried—cared for by generations to come.

Alas! It is one of the frailties of our human existence that we believe our legacies on earth will live on—long after our souls have bid adieu. For in truth, our lives are all largely destined to be forgotten within a generation after our death—even when entangled in family lore, enshrined in musty archives and yellowing photographs, or holding on with grim tenacity in oil portraits and memoirs. Graves crumble and become illegible, and words on stone memorials carry no more weight than a sculptor’s chisel. 

“Who were we” asks time, before whispering the answer to the winds: “Just another soul, passing through”. And George Thomas has—with just one known image, a memoir dictated to William Francklin, and a grave in Berhampur—all but vanished. 

A mercenary with an unlikely story, Thomas would, in his lifetime, mint his own currency, rule a foreign kingdom, and cede his home at Hisar to another mercenary—James Skinner—before eventually dying from the utterly banal: fever. Both men would leave their mark on India—only one is remembered today; the other is a dusty footprint. 

Ravaged by time and perhaps a weapon, the plaque outside his former home in Hisar, Haryana, nearly slices his name in two. A forlorn sentinel, it is a reminder that George Thomas once lived here—the Irish mercenary who ruled an Indian Kingdom, built a fort, and minted his own currency.

The fort he would build was George’s Home, or Georgegarh; in a delicious reversal of the British tradition of unilaterally changing the names of towns into ones that they could pronounce, the area is today, the village of—Jahazgarh. The fort he would co-opt was the once impregnable fort of Asigarh, in Hansi, with origins that hearken back to the 11th century Tomars.

Sandwiched between Hisar, Jahazgarh, Asigarh, a mistress at Sardhana, bandits who roamed across India, local tribes, royal courts, and the Royal Navy, is the story of a young man from the very un-Indian county of Tipperary.

 Born into poverty in Ireland, Thomas was press-ganged into the British Navy in his youth. His life would bring him all the way to India somewhere between 1781-2, and the East Indies naval station of Madras—modern day Chennai—where he promptly deserted and wandered across the subcontinent in search of himself and in search of a patron.  

With no formal learning, and armed with the faintest of reassurances that a Westerner might find favor in royal circles, Thomas set out on his epic adventure. It was a decision that was at once brazen and alarmingly foolhardy: his destination, Sardhana, and the court of Begum Samru, was over 2000 kms away. He was illiterate, and understood neither the languages, nor—more importantly—the terrain and culture of the land he was about to cross. The man who would one day refer to himself as The Rajah from Tipperary was a long way from home. 

He was one of thousands of European soldiers of fortune wandering across an unfamiliar land in an early rendition of a ‘Boy’s Own’ adventure. 

Nearly all were, in equal measure, searching for infamy and fortune—switching allegiances and even their faith if it meant a better deal. Benoît de Boigne, Fernão Lopes, Jean-Philippe de Bourbon-Navarre, and Jean-Baptiste Ventura, among others, treated the subcontinent as a personal cash register. Two in particular would cross the arc of Thomas’ life: Walter Reinhardt Sombre, and Armand de Levassoult. 

Unsurprisingly, these mercenaries found a ready market for their skills among the many empires and kingdoms in India between the 17th and early 19th centuries—often being hired to form and lead armies. And it wasn’t just smaller kingdoms that issued invitations. Jean Philippe de Bourbon served with Mughal Emperor, Akbar; Benoît de Boigne served with the Maharaja of Gwalior, Mahadji Shinde. Akbar is said have had so many mercenaries in his service that he built a suburb just for them in Delhi. Called Firingipura, or Foreigners' Town, the physical area has all but vanished into the mists of time. 

Which doesn’t quite explain why we were driving into the hazy summer heat of Haryana, looking for parts of George’s story. 

It began as a weird obsession with hearing the name, and wanting to find his fort—Georgegarh—only to realize during research that nothing remains except a few walls in a rural village. 

History swirls around the region however; when researching another palace—Firuz Shah Tughlaq’s 14th century pile of rubble in Hisar, I realized that centuries later, Thomas would live within its walls. 

History weaves a strange tapestry.  

Let's return to the curiousness of George Thomas’s life. It would take him five years to plod doggedly across India and reach his destination: the court of Begum Samru. Along the way, he absorbed an education no school would have provided—serving with the Polygars of Madurai and then the army of the Nizam of Hyderabad, Asaf Jah II. He then joined the Pindaris, a group of raiders plundering areas across the Deccan. 

In a sidebar, the Polygars would, between 1799-1805, lead some of the earliest struggles for Indian Independence—fighting the very people that their recruit, Thomas, once represented. 

A CROSSING OF PATHS

The legendary Begum Samru was a dancer, a nautch girl who was treated as a daughter by Mughal Emperor Shah Alam II; she caught the attention of the much older Walter Reinhardt Sombre, and would go on to marry him. Just 14 when she married, she would, in 1778, inherit his principality of Sardhana when he, predictably, died before her. 

Her reputation as a fair, yet tough-as-nails ruler who would often lead her men into battle was inversely proportionate to her height: she was four-and-a-half feet tall. Impressively wealthy—reportedly worth millions when she died—her court drew visitors from far and wide. Including, in 1787, a dusty and road-weary George Thomas. 

By contemporary accounts, Thomas was a tall and good-looking young man—if a little weathered by the Indian sun. Almost inevitably, he and the Begum would become lovers, and the Irishman’s tale might have ended right here, cocooned by more wealth than he’d ever dreamed of. But a ruler’s affections are often fickle and Thomas would be supplanted by a fellow mercenary, Armand de Levassoult. 

Eternally optimistic, even when leaving court as a scorned lover, Thomas found employment again, this time with a local Maratha Chieftain: Apa Khande Rao, in Haryana. 

May the road rise up to meet you. May the wind be always at your back. 

After a four-year stint fighting local battles on behalf of Rao, Thomas was made a Jagir—landlord—for his services. The area under his governance included land near Jhajjar, and the village where he would build his fort: Georgegarh. The Irish nabob and his growing ambitions had landed. 

When Apa Khande Rao died in 1797, Thomas struck. Declaring independence from the Marathas, he annexed nearby Rohtak and Hisar, and the ancient fort at Asigarh—becoming perhaps the only Westerner to rule a kingdom on the Indian subcontinent. The East India Company may have been steadily making inroads into India everywhere else; but here, Thomas’s word was the law. And his was the currency, minted locally and used to pay his soldiers and workers who helped restore Asigarh. 

Merely administering a kingdom wasn’t enough for the soldier of fortune. He would regularly attack nearby kingdoms in a bid to increase his empire, though in retrospect, he could have saved himself gunpowder and just redrawn a map or two. Cartography wasn’t one of Thomas’s strong suits; the borders of his kingdom, it was said, would fluctuate with impunity between 13 and 28 miles in different directions. 

THINKING OF HOME

Despite what one might think to be the pinnacle of a mercenary’s career, the Raja of Hansi longed, after an eventful two decades, to get back to Ireland—perhaps forgetting that he no longer spoke any functional form of English, just Hindustani and Persian. 

In wanting to go back after having earned his riches plundering another country, he was no different to every other mercenary and also most of the East India Company. Language was the least of their concerns; many were feted and honored on their return home, and perhaps that validation by his own people mattered more to him than Thomas realized—the local boy done good. Never mind that it was at the expense of another nation. 

There’s no small irony that his story begins and ends with the British. Thomas’s HQ at Asigarh, in Hansi, was initially defeated in 1802 by the Sikhs, led by—ironically—yet another mercenary, Louis Bourquien. 

The fort would eventually be seized by the East India Company later in 1802, after the Second Anglo-Maratha War, and would be held by them until Indian Independence in 1947. One of their officers—the Anglo-Indian mercenary, Colonel James Skinner—would make Hansi his headquarters and live in the Raja’s home at Hisar. Two of Skinner’s cavalry regiments—the 1st and 3rd Skinner’s Horse—are still part of the Indian Army, preserving his name for posterity; Hisar today remains home to the 33rd Armoured Division - the Strike Corp. 

Thomas was allowed to return to the English and seems to have been welcomed back into the fold despite deserting the Navy twenty years earlier. And why wouldn’t he be? Once unfamiliar with the country, he’d become a storehouse of local knowledge that the East India Company could only dream of gathering—resulting in past misdemeanors bowing to a cynical pragmatism. 

Somewhat ignominiously however, The Rajah of Tipperary died of fever in 1802, on his way down the Ganges River to Calcutta and back to Ireland; his life, and story, were promptly buried in the very land he was trying to leave forever. 

What of the area today? The once sprawling 14th century palace complex of Firuz-Shah-Tughlaq is a shadow of its former self, having been conquered by modern-day construction, a bus stand, and sellers of hot snacks and tea at its gates. 

George Thomas’s home once occupied a corner of the palace grounds and is a museum today; getting to the building, however, requires a two-kilometer detour around herds of cattle, built up areas, and busy roads. 

Much of the fort at Asigarh was flattened by the English after the First War of Indian Independence in 1857—shredding Thomas’s legacy along the way; what remains atop a treeless rise is a lightly cannon-scarred prison block, a water tank, a few gates, and faith—in the form of an old temple and a mosque. 

And one gate restored by the erstwhile Irish Raja of Hansi. 

Location Finder:

George Thomas's home at Jahaj Kothi, Jahaj Pul, Bank Colony, Balmik Nagar, Shastri Nagar, Hisar, Haryana 125001  

Approximate Latitude: 29.15394 | Longitude:75.72294  

Location Finder:

Asigarh Fort, Dhola Kuna, Hansi, Haryana 125033 

Approximate Latitude: 27.9856 | Longitude:76.5641 

(The  photographs here, as always, are all mine. Archival images in this post are in the public domain, and maps were created using Google Maps. The watercolor toward the end can be found at the British Library; it is a painting of Asigarh in 1814-15, by the talented Seeta Ram)