The Simla Manifesto had been explicit that the Shah would return home “surrounded by his own troops.” The problem was that Shuja at this point had no troops; indeed his only followers were his usual handful of mutilated household servants. So the first thing was to recruit a new army, the Shah Shuja Contingent. Would-be recruits began arriving in Ludhiana throughout the summer of 1838. A few of them were Indian Afghans of Rohilla descent whose ancestors had migrated to the Ganges basin in the eighteenth century, but most of them were local “Hindoos … camp followers from the Company’s military
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