Assessment and Revenue:
The British were after money, so they targeted the revenue stream in Bengal as the most important priority. It is therefore worth while to understand the scope of the revenue collection in Bengal. The Mughal system for land revenue administration was the sheet anchor of revenue system in Bengal. There were 25,000 villages in Bengal, grouped into 1600 parganas. For administrative purposes, the Parganas were grouped into 34 sarkars. During the middle of the 18th Century, the 1600 Parganas were grouped into 13 chaklas, or very large territorial sub-divisions. Each was administered by a Faujdar (commander of the army) or an Amil (civilian head). At that time, Murshid Quil also formed big zamindaris (landowners) and half the land revenue of Bengal was paid by just six large zamindars. The tax collection process simplified. The zamindari of Rajshahi, for instance, was formed by an agglomeration of many lapsed separate estates, extended over 12,909 sq. miles and 181 paraganas. A. Roy Rohan, a principal officer of the khalsa (Revenue Dept) was once asked, “What is a zamindar and what is a zamindari. His answer was, “A zamindar is a person possessing hereditarily on the condition of obedience to the ordinances of the government a tract of land under the denomination of a parganas or chakla subject to the payment of revenue. A zamindari is that kind of land registered in the records of government in the name of such a person.” The Mughals considered taking of land without paying for it an act of oppression. The revenue collection was moderate and fair. Akbar’s revenue minister, Raja Todar Mull, was well respected for instituting a fair tax collection system.
The Mughals also had a very fair and organized system for preparation of statistical data for the assessment of crop levies. The remuneration and the diet to be provided to assessing parties were also prescribed to prevent abuses. The season’s revenue depended on the records so prepared. This system was in existance since the days of Sher Shah Suri. Season by season, the measuring and writing parties appeared on the scene. The assessment statements were prepared twice yearly for every village and recorded and sent to the provincial head quarters and the central administration at Delhi. There were a great number of clerks whose job was to write and register. Clerical service afforded employment to a large portion of the population. The details are provided in Akbar-Nama, which was written by Abul Fzal, a courier of Akbar. In Mughal times, the revenue was realized only if the land was under cultivation and produced crops during the year.
The Revenue Roll was known as Asal Jumma Tumar for many generations. Revenue came from the land tax supported by abundant crops. In 1700 AD total assessment in Bengal was about twelve million rupees or about £1,200,000. The taxes also provided monies to maintain the prescribed military contingents. The Monarch as well as the Nawabs at various provinces maintained the treasury of the state full in the form of bullion reserve. In 1720, the revenue was about fourteen million rupees. The variation in the public demand on the zamindar was small. The possession of a zamindar was permanent and hereditary. The properties were secured by preserving a register of changes by sale, transfer, and inheritance.
The cultivators (ryots) were happy and content under the Mughal rule. The Zamindars (land owners) and talukdars treated the ryots (peasant) as their dependants. They looked after their welfare and maintained proper police and law and order. If any one suffered a loss, the zamindar felt personally responsible and often made good the loss. Complaints were readily heard and justice administered. The lands were well cultivated and the zamindars and talukdars found it in their interest to encourage and promote the increase in the number of inhabitants. Rents were moderate and properly assessed and related to the value of the produce. The officer of the department acted as Conveyancer.
Besides the land revenue, the revenue from duties on all articles amounted to another fifteen million rupees (£1,700, 000) per year. Besides Bengal, the Nawaz also collected land revenue and duties from the territories of Bihar and Orissa. The Bihar revenue was enough to satisfy the tributes paid to the Emperor at Delhi. The revenue data just described was for the Bengal Province, the rest of north India under the Mughal rule magnified the revenue many times over. That would explain the lavish lifestyles of the Mughals. The revenue and surpluses were so huge that they indulged in making monuments like Taj Mahal, issue gold mohurs (sovereigns) to affirm their love for their queens.
There were other fees for issuing Farmans (Royal Orders) and many nazranas (gifts); and the merchants, traders and the populace paid tributes to the Emperor as well. It was widely known that there was well over forty million £ in the treasury of Bengal at the time of the British invasion. During the reign of late Mughals, the Central Mughal Authority at Delhi was deprived of the revenue and in the case of Bengal, between 1740 to 1765 no remittance of cash was made to Delhi and there had accumulated about 400 to 450 million rupees from the revenues of Bengal in the form of gold and silver. The huge accumulation of gold in the Murshidabad treasury was well known to the European Traders in Bengal and the Dutch even wrote letter from Chinsura 0n 27 October, 1755 about that huge stockpile of gold. The British interest in that huge stockpile of gold would be best understood when one compares that the total revenue of Britain during the reign of Queen Elizabeth was about one million £.
“The Dutch also wrote in one of their letters the aborted attempt of the Mughal Cntral Authority to collect the Tributes. In 1749, repeated demands were made for the payment of the annual tribute in Delhi, Sardar Khan Mewati, a Jamadar, was actually sent from Delhi at the head of five hundred horsemen to bring this tribute. Alivardi Khan handed over to him the entire amount in coins. He put them in boxes and started for Delhi. When he and his men reached the frontiers of Bihar, a band of highwaymen suddenly attacked the escort near Sassaram and overpowered them. Sardar Khan Mewati could save only two hundred thousand rupees (£20,000) by timely flight to Poona. The so-called highwaymen took another route and brought the entire amount back to Murshidabad. The incident became very well known in India. But the Delhi Court could not officially take any cognizance of the incident. It was too much of an insult but the Emperor’s advisors at Delhi continued to cherish the fond hope that payment might be made in future.
Actually, all that Alivardi did was to send occasional presents and nazaranas (gifts) to Delhi collected from the revenues of Bihar and Orissa. Like the Dutch, the British were also aware of this incident and they had known the amount of money that was stashed up in the Mughal treasury at Murshidabad. That cash stockpile gave birth to the British conspiracy to loot the treasury. They mobilized their Man-O- war ships but were not sure of the success considering the Mughal defenses, so they got busy planning trickery, sabotage, deception and spies to raid the Treasury.
Gathering Clouds
At the start of its colonial era, which began somewhere around the year 1700, Britain found itself fighting many conflicts leading up to the American war of independence. To pay for those wars, England targeted the wealth of India. Britain had limited options, increased trade and earn some money or to borrow and lastly to fall back on its core competency which was loot, pillage and piracy. England tried all three and the last one provided the ultimate fulfillment. The attack on the Mughal treasury was so successful that England is enjoying the fruits of that conspiracy even today. It is a complex story as it involved a foreign culture, so it is described methodically and systematically leading the reader to its climax.
Britain could not rely solely on trade as there were limited opportunities for Britain, and neither had they had the monetary resources for larger share of the eastern trade. So Britain started borrowing and they borrowed as much as they could. The money market in those early days of the 18th century was modest and the resources of the banks were small. Money was borrowed from personal and private sources rather than from institutions and such a framework of money supply had limited resources with all the other caveats which limited the borrowings. During the middle of the eighteenth century, particularly during the war, the money supply became scarce due to heavy bor
rowings on government securities and the British navy bills and ordnance debentures were issued with no maturity date. Britain just did not have the resources to pay back all that borrowed money in any foreseeable future.
The British East India Company (EIC) operating in India, though a commercial body was essentially a British government enterprise. The EIC had six members on its Board of Control and the chairman was the member of the British Cabinet and the British government actively participated in what followed. They targeted the Mughal treasury at Murshidabad, which was the seat of government of the Mughal Diwan in Bengal. Also, the British had stopped paying the custom duties on the pretext that the Diwan (governor) of Bengal had waived those duties for the British trade. As stated earlier, in 1717, the Mughal Emperor Farrukhsiyar exempted EIC for payment of inland custom duties in Bengal; the British however illegally and fraudulently started using the internal trade permits for Mughal Imperial Export Trade Permits (dastaks) and ran up an unpaid balance of over one and a half million pounds. That sowed the seeds of a powerful conflict between the Nawab of Bengal and the East India Company. The British merchants also picked up fights with the Indian merchants who were procuring supplies for them against dadni (advances paid to manufacturers) merchandise for cotton, silk, opium, indigo dye, tea and saltpetre and ran up unpaid balances on their accounts. A huge amount of money was owed the dadni merchants who could only get notes from the British but no money. Remember that common saying, that a bank owns you if you owe the bank a small amount of money, but you own the bank if you owe it a lot of money. Well, the British had done their homework and the Indian merchants and the others were helpless, so did the Jagat Seths, who were Marwari bankers (from Rajasthan) to the Mughal Court, and routinely collected and disbursed the Mughal revenue, who were also owed a large sum of money which they had lent to EIC.
British Conspiracy:
In the British geo-political ambitions, India had become a lynchpin in their calculations for monetary resources. For the conspiracy to succeed in Bengal the British were hampered by the paucity of funds and they were essentially operating with slick tongue and false promises. So they promised i.o.u’s to all whom they needed to pull their treacherous craft. They also found the French in India an obstacle, so they fought the French as a mirror of their European war simultaneously.
During the early part of the year 1755, four man-of war ships of the British Navy manned by the British Foot and Artillery regiments sailed for India under the command of Rear-Admiral Charles Watson, Commander of a Royal Naval squadron. In 1754, Rear- Admiral Watson was serving in the European theater, trying to wind down the British role in the war of Austrian succession, when he was called home and appointed commander in chief for India operations. The urgency of the appointment of Charles Watson in the middle of his assignment, pointed to the dire need for funds as Britain and France had declared the Seven Year war (1756-63) to resolve their differing contentions on the frontier territories in the American colony. They were fighting since 1754 and Britain was suffering reverses for lack of funds and naval power. With the emergence of William Pitt as Prime Minister, a political change in Britain became a necessity and the appointment of Watson coincided with the emergence of Pitt as the new Prime Minister. Britain needed the money desperately for expansion of the Royal Navy.
The time line suggests that the British had taken a decision to loot the Mughal treasury and preparations towards that goal started earnestly during 1755 to getting the equipment, sailors, troop carriers, guns and man-o’-war ships ready for the mission. The ships involved were H.M third rate man- of-war Kent (74 guns), Cumberland (66), fourth rate Tyger (60), Salisbury (50), and the smallest the fifth rate Protector (44) was already in India somewhere in the Bombay waters busy in piracy raids. They arrived at Fort St. James (present day Madras) at the end of 1755, and waited for the Bengal conspiracy to incubate before they could sail for Calcutta up the Hooghly River. In the meantime, they kept themselves busy and occupied attacking the French at Pondicherry, the local merchant ships and the pirate ships and they filled their coffers with the loot. With undoubted ‘command of the sea’ locally, supported by a strong naval and military force, both the Royal and the EIC ‘sepoy contingents, set out to damage the French at Pondicherry on the Carnatic Coast of Eastern India. They met resistance from the French and the skilled defenses put up by the French under Joseph Dupleix. The British had built a Fort at Fort St David where they retreated after they were unsuccessful attacking the French. In November of 1755, they attacked Gheria, south India. Gheria was thought to be impregnable, but Charles Watson agreed to make an attempt on it to give relief to the company’s merchant vessels. After two days of bombardment, they were able to burn the pirate fleet and Gheria fell with a loss of ‘nineteen men killed and wounded’. The sailors, the fleet and their commander found the delay at Fort St James highly vexing and they waited and waited not knowing the issues confounding their spies in Bengal.
In Bengal, Alivardi Khan was managing the affairs of the state with remarkable success, his commander in Chief, Mir Jaffar had excess to 15,000 horse cavalry, 35,000 foot soldiers and 40 pieces of heavy cannons and some of the heavy cannons were manned by French artillery officer Monsieur Sin Frey. The French and the Mughals had good relations as a counter to the British and the British mission appeared foolhardy as long as Alivardi Khan was the Diwan of Bengal. The British stared at death as long as Alivardi Khan ruled Bengal and their mission had little chance of success. It was a savage climate under which they came to India. A British article of war, forced the sailors to kill or get killed by their own forces for failure. Failure was not an option and as is known, Admiral John Byng was shot for failure to destroy a French force. The drama soon unfolded, hardly to anyone’s surprise, that Alivardi Khan suddenly died, and met a premature death1 on April 10, 1756. The disruptive forces which had been kept under check by Alivardi Khan got out of hand and the Bengal province passed out of effective control opening the door to all kind of intrigues by the British.
During the British rule, many deaths occurred at the critical juncture tipping the outcome in the British favor. In 1779, Haider Ali defeated the British forces when they ventured in his territory for annexation & he suddenly died when he was getting into an alliance with the Marathas against the British. In 1839, Ranjit /singh suddenly died when the British could not travel to Afghanistan through Punjab and later three of his sons died in quick succession trying to take over the power of the state as successors. (Major Broad foot of the British Army was stationed in the court of Ranjit Singh as a friend of the court). There will be many other similar instances as the narrative unfolds. Even in the case of Alivardi Khan, one Robert Orme of EIC stationed at Fort William Calcutta was quoted in the elimination of Alivardi Khan.
Warren Hastings, who would later become the First British Governor General in India, was stationed at Cossimbazar factory, the river port of the capital city of Murshidabad, also the home of the Mughal Treasury. He spent time at the court of Mir Jaffar learning vernacular, the native languages, and worked in the weaving department of the Cossimbazar factory. He joined the sevice of the East India Company in 1750 at age 18 and six years later, when Alivardi Khan suddenly died, Hastings was imprisoned on suspicious grounds by Siraj-ud-Daula, the heir to the Bengal Diwani. It was only through the influence of the French and the Dutch that he was spared and he sailed back to England in 1764. His promotion to Governor General was pushed by Clive, as a reward for services rendered that made the invasion of Plassey possible.
Mir Jaffar was married to the sister of Alivardi Khan and the British considered him an ideal candidate for having the pretensions to the ‘Nawabship’, so they went about encouraging him in his ambition to become the next Diwan of Bengal with the promise of British support. (That was the usual trick the British employed. Later, the reader will see a similar promise of support, which led to the Sykes-Picot Agreement and the division and annexation of the Middle East between the British and the
French). The British also knew that the Mughals had weakness for power and Mir Jaffar could be tricked in their designs. The British therefore needed someone to sell him the bill of goods, whatever those goods were, and there were a lot of soldiers of fortune floating around in Bengal countryside from Central Asia, Persia and Afghanistan besides the British, who had flooded the countryside and the British had plenty of company for knavery and freebootry.
After the death of Alivardi Khan, his grandson, Mirza Mohammed, a young man of about nineteen years (popularly known as Siraj-ud-Daula) became the Nawab of Bengal and the British found him a fly in their ointment. A lot has been written by the British about their troubles with Siraj-ud-Daula, but he was acting in his power as the Diwan of Bengal and he was forcing the British to abide by the agreements and the terms under which they were granted leasing rights to the Fort William property. The British also owed one and a half crores (£1.5 million) against the backlog of ‘dastak accounts’ as EIC had defrauded the State by covering the trade of the natives with the company’s ‘dastak’ vouchers and it was the duty of the Diwan to recover those monies. Looking at the bigger picture however, Siraj was only the accidental Nawab because of the sudden death of Alivardi Khan. The die to invade India and loot the treasury at Murshidabad had already been cast in London and the British Military and Naval flotilla was dispatched from Britain in 1755 long before Alivardi Khan died. The British invasion army and the war ships had already arrived in November 1755 and were waiting at Madras (Fort St. James facility) when Siraj ud Daula took over for a brief rule. He was captured and murdered by the British three days after the Plassey episode and his rule is not important to this story and it is best to skip all that took place between him and the British. It can best be summed up as a fight between good and evil.
1757- East of the Cape of Good Hope Page 7
