To Begin the World Over Again
Page 37
Besieged in the fort at Chunar, Hastings quickly organized an offensive against the rebels. Among those sent to relieve the governor-general and suppress the uprising were Captain Baker and Dean Mahomet. The arrival of fresh troops quickly turned the tide. Company troops under Major Popham scored a critical victory at Sacrut before marching on Pateetah, where the crucial engagement took place. Mahomet, who witnessed the battle, had praise for both sides (perhaps a reflection of his hybrid loyalties and affinities):
They fought on both sides, with great ardor and intrepidity, till victory perplexed with doubt, waited the arrivals of Lieutenants Fallow [Fallon] and Berrille [Birrell], whose gallant conduct with the united bravery of their countrymen, preponderating in the scale of her unbiased judgment, induced the Goddess to bestow on them her unfading laurels, as the reward for their exertions.
It was, Mahomet lamented, “a dreadful carnage of killed and wounded on each part.” The raja’s army fled the field in defeat and the mopping up began.11
This brief and bloody conflict was just one theater of the wider war sweeping the world in the 1770s and 1780s, tied with unseen tendrils to the battlefields of North America. Chait Singh, whose arrest touched off the fighting, however, was no ally of America, no friend of France. He was in fact a British ally, signatory to a treaty with the East India Company. The Raja of Benares and his subjects were not victims of open war, but a sacrifice to Britain’s bottomless need for funds. The economic costs of a world war spared no one.
The repercussions of Chait Singh’s rebellion were not limited to Benares alone, instead spreading to undermine the independent foundations of other Indian states. The state of Oudh, the center of a fabulously rich and sophisticated culture emanating from its capital at Lucknow, widely considered to be the most mesmerizingly beautiful city in India, occupied a crucial position between British Bengal and the domains of the Mughals and Marathas. As such, it had long been a key part of Hastings’ plans to create a buffer zone between Company possessions and those of their powerful Indian rivals. Indeed, the Nawab of Oudh had been the overlord of the rajas of Benares until 1775, when the new nawab, Asaf-ud-Daula, under pressure from Hastings, agreed to cede sovereignty over the territory to the British. A decade earlier, after defeat by the British at the Battle of Buxar in 1764, Shuja-ud-Daual, the previous Nawab of Oudh, had agreed to a treaty of alliance with the British that stipulated that Oudh would pay a regular fee for the maintenance of troops to support a defensive alliance with the East India Company. Despite the great wealth of Oudh, much of the new nawab’s inheritance, in both land and revenue, had already been distributed to officials and retainers as grants or Jaghires before he came to the throne. Like many Indian rulers before and since, Asaf-ud-Daula struggled under the weight of his treaty obligations with the British and quickly racked up a massive debt of over £600,000. In order to pay his debts to the British, the nawab was forced to borrow a substantial sum of money from his mother and grandmother, the begums of Oudh, in return for lands worth far more than the loan itself, lands that were in turn seized by the British.12
When Chait Singh rebelled in the face of his arrest, Asaf-ud-Daula stood by his British alliance, but the begums were implicated in the rebellion and the lands granted the begums by the nawab were seized by the British as the price of their treachery. Much of Oudh’s wealth had passed to the begums when the nawab’s father died, contrary to Islamic law, and so, instead of opposing Hastings’ seizure of the begums’ fortune, Asaf-ud-Daula actually encouraged it. Still, when combined with the already onerous treaty of alliance, granting further revenue to the East India Company only served to undermine the sovereignty of Oudh, and placed it in an even more subordinate position. When Asaf-ud-Daula died in 1797, his adopted son was raised to the throne with British support, only to be deposed by the British a year later and replaced by his brother, Sadaat Ali Khan, who in turn granted the Company fully half of the territory of Oudh.13
The rebellion of Benares in 1781 bears a striking resemblance to the revolt of the American colonies in 1775. In both situations, an overstretched British Empire placed increasingly stringent economic demands on its peripheral subjects, pleading the necessity of defending its far-flung possessions against French incursions. In Benares as in America, it was popular resistance that lit the fuse of conflict, a subaltern insurrection against the representatives of empire. But for Benares, the rebellion was short-lived, the raja’s army quickly crushed by the superior numbers of the East India Company. Even so, the population of Benares would continue to resist, refusing to pay their customary taxes and attacking collectors of the revenue. Captain Baker and Dean Mahomet were sent with their battalion to put an end to this resistance, and spent months rooting out peasant rebels. Armed only with bows and arrows and home-made long-guns, the locals stood no chance and “the refractory were awed into submission by the terror of our arms.” Mahomet did his duty, but he had mixed feelings about his role in the suppression of Benares, writing in a verse lament:
Alas! Destructive war with ruthless hand,
Unbinds each fond connection, tender tie,
And tears from friendship’s bosom all that’s dear,
Spreading dire carnage thro’ the peopled globe;
Whilst fearless innocence, and trembling guilt,
In one wide waste, are suddenly involv’d.
War wakes the lover’s, friend’s and orphan’s sigh,
And on empurpled wings bears death along,
With haggard terror, and with wild dismay,
And desolation in savage train:
From slow-consuming time, his lazy scythe,
With ruffian violence is torn away,
To sweep, at once, whole Empires to the grave.14
And yet, Dean Mahomet was not the only one to have deep misgivings about the actions of Warren Hastings and the East India Company during the years of war. Indeed, there were deep divisions among British authorities in both Calcutta and London over the appropriate role of the East India Company in the affairs of the subcontinent, and it was this divide that was the underlying factor in the fall of Warren Hastings and the authoritarian transformation of British India.15
Born to a family of Oxfordshire ministers in 1732, Hastings had arrived in a very different Bengal as a writer for the East India Company in September of 1750. By 1770 Hastings had risen to become a member of the Madras council before being promoted to Governor of Bengal in 1772. By the time of his appointment as governor, the British government had grown weary of the constant mismanagement of British Bengal. In his memorable characterization, Edmund Burke castigated Company rule in Bengal as “animated with all the avarice of age, and all the impetuosity of youth, they roll in one after another; wave upon wave; and there is nothing before the eyes of the natives but an endless, hopeless, prospect of new flights of birds of prey and passage, with appetites continually renewing for a food that is continually wasting.” To many eyes, the problem was that what had previously been, at least outwardly, a commercial settlement focused on trade, was by 1770 a British territorial state, but one run by an antiquated system designed for regulating a solely commercial enterprise. Company officials arrived with pecuniary, mercantile motivations rather than administrative ambitions. Equally vexing was that even in such a rich territory—and all agreed that Bengal had vast potential revenues—the method of revenue extraction was failing to meet the costs of administering such a large territory.16
Everyone seemed to agree that the problem with British India was the structure of, and concomitant mismanagement by, the East India Company. What exactly should be done to remedy the situation was, however, a matter of intense debate. Many, like Lord Clive, who had personally done so much to add territory to the Company’s patrimony, thought the scope of British possessions in India required “the nation’s assistance,” being “too extensive for a mercantile company.” Others, while conceding the need for reforms, feared that further entanglements in India would drain the resources
of Britain, and as the conflict with the American colonies picked up steam, such concerns became more pressing and more vocal. With all of this in mind, Parliament passed the East India Regulating Act in 1773, restructuring the Company’s government in India by creating a new executive body, the supreme council, consisting of five members and led by Hastings as the first governor-general. To ensure that justice was properly maintained, a supreme court consisting of royally appointed judges was likewise established.17
Hastings had taken up the mantle of governorship with a keen sense of the immense potential of Bengal to provide revenue for Britain and a steely determination to make the province pay. When he was appointed governor-general, Hastings realized that Bengal—with its 20 million inhabitants, revenue equal to fully a quarter of Britain’s, and exports valued at upwards of £1 million—was a potential gold mine. He had instructions to help the region’s economy recover from the 1770 famine and to take a more direct role in the collection of tax revenue. Prior to his arrival, taxes had been collected through quotas levied on local hereditary landholders known as zamindars. The quota each zamindar was obligated to pay was supposed to be based on the value of cultivation of peasant lands in his possession. Hastings thought these customary tax obligations were inefficient and considered zamindars to be hereditary government officials, tax collectors, rather than landholders with long-held rights and obligations. He thus opened tax collection to the highest bidder, thinking this tax-farming system would maximize revenues.18
Though he reformed the revenue system and pushed for greater supervision of tax collection, Hastings sought to do so in a way that maintained Indian officials and Indian forms of administration and government. He had little faith in the ability or probity of European officials, and by 1781, he had replaced most British “collectors” with Indian supervisors of tax collection. Overall, Hastings was concerned to implement what he saw as needed reforms, but in ways that would not disrupt Indian tradition nor alienate Britain’s new Indian subjects. In the words of one historian,
He believed that Bengal must be governed in ways to which its people were presumed to be accustomed. Indian methods of government and Indian law must be preserved. The British should aim “to rule this people with ease and moderation according to their own ideas, manners, and prejudices” (Gleig, 1.404). He considered that Hinduism and Hindu and Islamic law were in certain respects admirable in themselves as well as being suited to the needs of the population who had come under British rule. He encouraged British officials to learn languages, make studies, and translate texts. While he believed that there could be no limitations on the company’s sovereignty and that no Indian authority could be allowed to compete with it, he felt that the exercise of the powers of government under British direction should for the most part be left in Indian hands. He had no high opinion of the capacity or the disinterestedness of the great bulk of the company’s British servants.19
With tax income from land thus becoming such a vital component of the Company’s revenue, Hastings was convinced that concentrating solely on commercial activities was counterproductive. Yet, with resources already stretched near to breaking point, he was adamant that further territorial acquisitions were undesirable and even dangerous. He proposed to follow a middle path between further conquest and pure commercialism; he would seek alliances with neighboring native states with an eye to creating a “ring fence” of allies to protect British Bengal, but at the same time resolved not to be drawn into Indian affairs. It would be “a general system . . . to extend the influence of the British nation to every part of India not too remote from their possessions, without enlarging the circle of their defence or involving them in hazardous or indefinite engagements and to accept the allegiance of such of our neighbours as shall sue to be enlisted among the friends and allies of the King of Great Britain.” Hastings therefore created buffer zones around British interests—Arcot, the Carnatic, and eventually Hyderabad, around Madras, Oudh and Benares around Bengal—by entering into alliances with pliant native powers, stationing British troops in these territories, and billing their rulers for the cost of maintaining these defenses. In this way, the rich territory of Bengal could be mined for its wealth, without danger to British possessions or the costs of further warfare.20
Deposing Chait Singh was thus the logical result of a policy that sought Indian alliances that would pay their own way. Not only had Benares refused to pay the fees Hastings felt he urgently required in the context of war, and that he felt Benares could readily afford, but the state had gone so far as to rebel, threatening the fragile buffer zone around Bengal. Such behavior could not be tolerated from allies, and an example had to be made. What is more, Hastings could convince himself that a policy of billing allies for troops and seizing their lands when they failed or refused to pay, was consistent with his desire to retain Indian forms of government and administration. When Mir Jafar had been forced to accept financial and military obligations upon his accession as Nawab of Bengal in 1757, and when Chait Singh was made to do the same in 1775, British leaders were hardly reinventing the wheel. Such obligations had long been a part of the Mughal Empire’s fragile federation, and would continue to be pursued by other native rulers. For instance, the cause of the war between the Marathas and Mysore, which did so much to drive a wedge between the two foremost Indian states and to undermine Tipu Sultan’s ability to defeat the British, was largely a matter of a disagreement between Tipu and the Marathas over Mysore’s right to extract tribute and military obligations from a zamindar on the borderlands between the two powers.
Indeed, Hastings’ governorship can be seen as both the apogee of the Orientalist approach to Company rule, and part of a wider trend in governance among post-Mughal states more broadly. Within India, and indeed beyond, indigenous and European imperial states were moving along a similar trajectory, emphasizing centralization, the displacement of local aristocracies, the development of a substantial tax base, and the organization of the state for the purposes of war. The strategies employed in developing these fiscal-military states, and the ideologies employed to legitimate them, were remarkably similar. For example, both Haidar Ali of Mysore and Warren Hastings attempted to secure their landed revenue base by removing hereditary rights from local elites, and in both cases this was justified through appeals to Mughal precedent, which considered local landholders to be zamindars, with no permanent right to the revenue from their lands. Thus in Mysore and Bengal, revenue reforms designed to support a centralizing fiscal-military regime were based on existing forms of governance and couched in terms of continuity with the Mughal past.21
For Hastings, relying on Mughal precedent made sense. He genuinely admired Indian history and culture, and firmly believed that indigenous forms of administration were best suited for governing India. What is more, he understood that if a tiny number of British officials were to rule a large Indian population, the manner of British governance had to be made acceptable to the people. He thus made attempts to cultivate both Hindu and Muslim support by presenting his regime as “neo-Brahmanical and neo-Mughal.” To this end, Hastings sponsored the codification and translation of Hindu and Muslim legal codes as a means of restoring indigenous forms of justice, and supported efforts by scholars such as William Jones to translate and publish Indian works of history, literature, and religion that stressed the inherent similarity and compatibility of Hinduism and Islam and their commonalities with Western culture and religion. Though such measures were certainly useful instrumentally as a means of shoring up support for British rule, Hastings, William Jones and others of this circle also hoped to present Indian culture and history to Europe in a positive light as a way of undermining the wrong-headed prejudice they felt was undermining efficacious relations between the two. As one historian has suggested, for Hastings, “Knowledge of Asian languages was not simply a tool for ruling in Asia; it created awareness of rich cultures of which British people were ignorant and inclined to be contemptuous. Such awareness
would be, he was later to write, the means of a ‘reconciliation’ of ‘the people of England to the natives of Hindostan’.”22
Others strongly disagreed with Hastings’ reforms and tactics, and were not convinced that a trading company was designed to rule such a large and populous territory. At the same time, many in Britain hoped to prevent the machinations of the Company from drawing the British state too deeply into Indian affairs, with its attendant costs. Instead, they advocated for a policy in which the EIC would concentrate on commerce, keeping itself free from the costly and byzantine entanglements of the subcontinent. Philip Francis, Hastings’ most vociferous opponent in India, “argued that the overriding policy should be peace, that Britain should not seek territorial extensions, nor make entangling alliances with Indian princes . . . that the company ought to be confined purely to trade and have no part in the government of India: ‘a trading company is unqualified for sovereignty.’ ” Hastings’ Orientalist regime was becoming increasingly interventionist, consistently drawing the British into the affairs of their neighbors. It was on these grounds that Francis had attacked Hastings’ conduct in the Rohilla War shortly after his arrival in Calcutta, and it was on these grounds that he had opposed the expansion of the Maratha War, leading to the duel with the governor-general. The “rebellion” of Chait Singh was merely another instance of Hastings’ expansionist ambitions, and, in Francis’s eyes, another example of the dangers of unnecessary entanglements in India affairs.23
It seemed clear to many that Hastings had only proceeded against the Raja of Benares after the departure of his most virulent critic. Philip Francis had left for London in November 1780, leaving Hastings with a free hand for the first time since 1774. In a letter to a friend in England, Hastings crowed about his new, unchallenged position. “Mr. Francis has announced his intention to leave us. His departure may be considered as the close of one complete period of my political life and the beginning of a new one . . . I shall have no competitor to oppose my designs, to encourage disobedience to my authority, to excite and foment popular odium against me. In a word, I shall have power, and I will employ it.” And employ it he did, in Benares, Gwalior, Malabar, and the Carnatic, but all the while, back in London, his enemies had been busy sharpening their knives.24