indianepics
Contribute
Evidence1843

Conquest of Sindh

Miani, north of Hyderabad, Sindh (Pakistan)

The Battle of Meeanee, 17 February 1843 title QS:P1476,en:"The Battle of Meeanee, 17 February 1843 "label QS:Len,"The Battle of Meeanee, 17 February 1843 "
The Battle of Meeanee, 17 February 1843 title QS:P1476,en:"The Battle of Meeanee, 17 February 1843 "label QS:Len,"The Battle of Meeanee, 17 February 1843 ". Edward Armitage, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Charles Napier defeats the Talpur amirs at Miani and Dubba near Hyderabad, and the Company annexes Sindh and the lower Indus.

Sindh's Talpur amirs had been made to let British armies cross their country to Afghanistan in 1838-39. After the disaster at Kabul, Charles Napier, sent to impose a harsher treaty, provoked a war. On 17 February 1843 his force of about 2,800 broke a far larger Baluch army at Miani, and on 24 March it won again at Dubba, also near Hyderabad. The pin marks Miani, about six miles north of the city beside the Fuleli. Sindh was annexed, governed by Napier until 1847, and then attached to the Bombay Presidency.

The conquest gave the Company the lower Indus and the port of Karachi, which grew, once railways reached it, into the Punjab's main port.

Even contemporaries thought the war unjust; Napier's own journal called the seizure a piece of rascality, if a useful one. The one-word dispatch "Peccavi" ("I have sinned") attributed to him was a joke printed in Punch.

  • war
  • colonial