General Sir Charles James Napier, led the military conquest of Sindh, served as the Governor of Sindh, and Commander-in-Chief in India


Illustration from an Illustrated history of India published by Cassell, Petter & Galpin circa 1876. Info from wiki: General Sir Charles James Napier, was an officer and veteran of the British Army's Peninsula, and 1812 campaigns, and later a Major General of the Bombay Army, during which period he led the military conquest of Sindh, before serving as the Governor of Sindh, and Commander-in-Chief in India. Napier was appointed Governor of the Bombay Presidency by Lord Ellenborough. However, under his leadership the administration clashed with the policies of the directors of the British East India Company, and Napier was accordingly removed from office and returned home in disgust. He also quarrelled repeatedly with Lord Dalhousie, the Governor-General of India. The source of the dispute was Dalhousie's behaviour on India's north-west frontier. Dalhousie had requested repeated punitive raids against villagers who had not paid taxes. Napier was opposed to these tactics. In his posthumously published 'Defects, Civil and Military of the Indian Government' he detected and condemned the growing superciliousness of the English in India towards the Indians; 'The younger race of Europeans keep aloof from Native officers. He proposed that British officers should learn the language of the natives and that native officers be appointed as ADCs and Companions of the Bath. ‘The Eastern intellect is great, and supported by amiable feelings’, he wrote, ‘and the Native officers have a full share of Eastern daring, genius and ambition; but to nourish these qualities they must be placed on a par with European officers.’ When revolt broke out in 1857, Napier's 'Defects' was hailed as a prophetic work which correctly identified many of the seething tensions in the sub-continent


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