British Brigadier John Nicholson’s monument at Taxila, Pakistan
British Brigadier General John Nicholson’s monument tower in Taxila Pakistan is a symbol of repression and tyranny that the East India Company reserved for this wretched country.
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I went to Brigadier General Nicholson’s (1822-1857) Obelisk at Taxila Pakistan to see what made him so important to the East India Company. I later found out it was his sheer brutality, contempt of native Indians and psychopathic rage that East India Company found very useful in repressing the natives.
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This Brigadier Nicholson is not to be confused with the WW-2 Nicholson of Calais fame, or the Nicholson of Pakistan Air Force. Nicholson’s monument Pakistan is for the guy after which Nicholson road Lahore was named.
‘I dislike India and its inhabitants more every day’ and Afghans were ‘the most vicious and blood thirsty race in existence’
Of the captured Indian mutineers of 1857 he wrote ‘I would inflict the most excruciating tortures on them with perfectly easy conscience’
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The graves of more than two million British in India demonstrates that it was not simply a place to get rich in, but a place to often, to die in at an early age.
‘If I could earn 200 pounds a year there, I would come back to Ulster (Ireland)’ he once wrote to his mother. So finances were a definite consideration for him to staying there.
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‘I am sorry I am late, gentlemen, but i have been hanging your cooks’, Nicholson once casually told his mess tent officers, while pouring a glass of wine, suspecting them of poisoning their food.
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His contemptuous and hateful attitude for natives of subcontinent was built due to his experience of captivity with the Afghans in the disastrous Ghazni campaign of 1839 and the murder and genital mutilation of his younger brother during their retreat through the Khyber Pass.
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Nicholson, like the military tyrants East-India company unleashed on the hapless North-Western Indians, believed that India was a barbarous land that God had called upon the British to civilize by force. He probably recited the same mantra during his ritual bible chapter recitation, every day, to justify his sins. And we have Nicholson’s monument Pakistan for this guy.
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Polar opposite to his hatred for native, was the fact that his only trusted body guards and mounted troops were irregular and unpaid tribals from the North West. Every aspect of his personality pointed to the dark triads of personality disorders like narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism
He would have rebels slaughtered and then write ‘my favorite mooltanis, Pathan and Afridi’ at their graves.
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Once he decapitated a recalcitrant tribal leader and placed his severed head on his desk as a deterrent for others.
Another time he had a cook boy severely beaten twice for crossing his path, which lead to the kid’s death.
Once he had Muslim cleric shaved for not saying salaam to him properly.
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He never married and never had kids.
His mentor, the chief administrator of Punjab John Lawrence and later Viceroy thought of him difficult to work with and far keen to humiliate Indian leaders. Others found his keenness to flog Indians without any grounds, deeply disturbing. He once had an Indian leader lick his own spit from the very ground the spit landed on.
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Nicholson was amongst the group of young martial law administrators centered on present day Pakistani Punjab and Khyber PakhtoonKhwa. His colleagues were the two Lawrence brothers, Henry and John of Lawrencepur fame, Herbert Edwardes, James Abbot (of Abbottabad Fame), Reynell Taylor, Harry Burnett Lumsden. This Nicholson’s monument Pakistan is in reverence to the East India Compnany’s useful officer.
Their job was primarily revenue collection, policing, justice dispensation, law and order, suppression of revolt and bribing cruel Malik and chieftains to garner support.
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The only people they befriended were British like themselves, not even Anglo-Indians. Once Mr. Nicholson once expressed displeasure to his mentor Mr. Lawrence for posting an Anglo Indian as his Assistant.
William Darymple called him an ‘imperialistic psychopath’; Donal P. Mc Craken thought he wasn’t ‘normal’. Ronald Hyams called him a ‘homosexual pedophile bully’. Ommaney thought of him a ‘great brute’. (Do read about sociopath)
Both Abraham Lincoln and Nicholson used the ‘blue pill’ for unexplained illnesses that was a concoction containing 33% mercury. No wonder Nicholson suggested lynching and skinning mutineers.
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It was during the War of Independence of 1857, that was a long time coming, Nicholson let go of all façade of cavity and took his irregular cavalry on a murderous rampage all along the GT road from Nowshehra, Attock ( do read about Attock fort), Sialkot ( Do read about things to see in Sialkot) and finally to Delhi. He was shot at the Burns Gate of Delhi fort, most likely by his own men, for being such a snobbish, arrogant, racist bully – while storming the resistance. He has his own Nicholson tomb in Delhi.
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I personally feel he felt stuck in his inner prison of loneliness, contempt, hate, lack of recourse, emotional traumas and the need to make a living.
The East India Company had to send the cruelest and barbaric military offices’ to the region that is now Pakistan and then the world complains why Pakistanis seem to have collective Bipolar disorder.
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The guy even has a person religious cult in the land that is now Pakistan, called the ‘Nichol-sayein’ (saint in Urdu)
Brigadier General Nicholson was commissioner Rawalpindi and Bannu and served for a long time in KhyberPakhtoonKhwa region from his commission around 1845 to 1857.
Nicholson Monument should be re-christened by Pakistan as a reminder never to allow tyrants in the garb of liberators to rule this land. Indus valley was always civilized and does not need another dictator teaching us what democratic, pluralistic living is about.
Visit the place, and see the lay of the land on the Islamabad side and the Taxila side from high above.
Watch the video too.