A History of Britain, Volume 2

by Simon Schama

  For all the dourness of his demeanour and his bewildering habit of watering his wine (to Calcutta society yet another irritating sign of his moral loftiness), Warren Hastings was a man who fell in love easily and hopelessly. After his first wife died he fell for the blonde wife of a German artist calling himself ‘Baron’ Imhoff, and when the Baron returned to Europe Marian stayed behind and became the second Mrs Hastings in 1777. It was a love-match that endured as long as they did. But in a much more fatal way Hastings fell for India: its gorgeous clamour; the battered beauty of its shrines and temples; its heady, aromatic disorder. He wanted desperately to be a Mughal, or at the very least a nawab. He wanted to make the Company Indian. The East India Regulation Act (1773) steered through parliament by Lord North on the eve of the American Revolution seemed to give him the authority of his heart’s desire, since it promoted him from governor of Bengal to the first holder of the new office of ‘Governor-General’, with seniority (much to their intense chagrin) over his fellow governors in Madras and Bombay. But what the Act gave it also took away. For the Governor-General was to rule in tandem with a council composed of four men appointed by the Crown and Company, his own vote counting no more in decisions than theirs.

  This, on the face of it, contradictory decision, both to concentrate and to disperse the governing power, was in fact in keeping with shifting definitions (much tested by America) of the theory of constitutional checks and balances. To have even a faint chance of practical success presupposed an essential community of interests between the Governor-General and the council, with differences arising only on details. But from the very first day of their encounter relations between Hastings and the councillors thrust on him, three of whom had not the slightest working knowledge of India prior to arriving, were an unmitigated disaster. By giving them four salvoes short of a twenty-one-gun salute on their arrival in Calcutta, Hastings had given immediate offence to the likes of the spluttering Lieutenant–General John Clavering. In fact, their grasp of the meaning of protocol correctly divined that the mild humiliation was entirely intentional, for while Hastings, justifying his action to the directors at home, laughed it all off as absurdly ‘frivolous’, he made sure to say that he could not have done anything else without compromising the ‘dignity’ of his office.

  In the tight little world of white Calcutta, such snubs and slights were the equivalent of undeclared war. (What a loss to English literature that Jane Austen never walked Tank Square or sat observantly beneath a banyan on Garden Reach!) And if the councillors took a dislike to Hastings personally, they were – with the exception of the amiably profligate Richard Barwell – no more enamoured of his policies. When he purged the revenue administration they believed he had done it to put in his own creatures in the place of those dismissed. When he launched a war against the Afghan Rohilla tribes on behalf of the Nawab of Awadh, they assumed he was doing it as a mercenary to take a cut of the proceeds. Company business became hostage to the playing out of personal vendettas, none more ferociously pursued than that between Hastings and another councillor, Philip Francis. When a Bengali–Hindu revenue administrator named Nandakumar testified (almost certainly falsely) in public that the Governor-General had taken bribes (although he might have taken unauthorized allowances), Hastings retaliated inciting a prosecution against Nandakumar for embezzling the estate of a deceased debtor. Nandakumar was arrested, indicted for forgery, tried by the new British Supreme Court in Calcutta and, after a mockery of an eight-day trial, sentenced to be hanged, on the authority of a British statute passed in the reign of George II that had little meaning in Hindu law or custom.

  The travesty of justice was atypical of Hastings’ governance, which was criticized for paying too much, not too little, attention to indigenous law and institutions. Part of the distaste felt by his enemies for Hastings was precisely that, in his eagerness to go native, he had forgotten himself, the Company and the commission he was supposed to discharge, which was to bring British government and justice to the Indians and not the other way about. It would be a sentimental exaggeration to say that the generals and the judges and the Francises barged in on an Anglo-Indian world that was genuinely pluralist. Like its sister cities Madras and Bombay, Calcutta was obviously and aggressively segregated between White and Black Towns. In so far as Indians filled the houses on Garden Reach and Chowringhee, they did so as servants: palanquin bearers, gardeners, cooks, watchmen, runners, sweepers, gatekeepers. But from the paintings of Tilly Kettle and Johann Zoffany (who came to India to repair his career after offending the royal family) it’s apparent that for a brief ten or twenty years the boundaries between races and cultures were looser and more elastic, even mutually sympathetic, than at any time before or since. Sex is no sure guide to multicultural tolerance, but with European women still relatively scarce, and very prone to tropical infections, especially during pregnancy and childbirth, it was not uncommon for Company men to take long-term Indian mistresses or even in rare cases (like the Hyderabad resident James Achilles Kirkpatrick, who conducted a politically dangerous love affair with a young woman from the local Muslim aristocracy) to marry them. The lawyer William Hickey, who left a chatty diary of Calcutta in the 1780s and 1790s, wrote tenderly of his long-term lover Jemdani, for whom he bought a country house on the Hooghly where the two of them entertained their mutual friends. She was, he wrote, ‘respected and admired by all my friends, by her extraordinary sprightliness and good humour . . . unlike the women in general in Asia she never secluded herself from the sight of strangers, on the contrary she delighted in joining my male parties, cordially joining in the mirth which prevailed’. What happened to the children of these unions suggests both the possibilities and the limits of relationships across the racial border, for, while the offspring were usually looked after very well and educated, whether that education took place in India or England depended very much on the darkness or fairness of their skin.

  Though none of the Company men posed for their portraits along with their Asian mistresses, they did choose to have themselves depicted together with the banians, who managed private trade for them (circumventing official restrictions) and were a crucial source of both commercial and political intelligence. Many of them, like the banian shown with the trader John Mowbray, came from the culturally sophisticated gentry class of the bhadralog in Bengal, the dynasties that produced the Tagores. In Britain there was a presumption that new money was philistine, but the commercial shrewdness of these men kept company with a devotion to poetry and to mythological and sacred texts. It was natural, then, for Warren Hastings to believe that effective Company government required more than information about the cultivation of indigo. It also needed a working familiarity with Indian languages, both classical and vernacular, with religion, law, history and politics. So, from the mid-1770s to his foundation of the Asiatic Society in Bengal in 1784, Warren Hastings became the first great patron of Indian scholarship for Europeans. A group of protégés, many of them very young, were commissioned to produce the works that he hoped would be the foundation of educated and disinterested government. Nathaniel Brassey Halhed’s ‘Gentoo Code’, a digest of Sanskrit law-books, appeared in 1776. Some eleven years later, the first English–Hindustani dictionary, A Dictionary, English and Hindoostannee, was published in two parts from 1787 to 1790 by the Scottish physician John Gilchrist who had gone from Bombay to Faizabad, grown a long beard like a sannyasi (religious mendicant) and ‘assumed for a time the dress of the natives’. Gilchrist spent years listening intently to his language teachers or munshis, working out the phonetics of the language, and went on to become the first Professor of Hindustani at the College of Fort William, founded by Governor-General Wellesley in 1800.

  None of this is to say that Hastings or his oriental scholars – Halhed, Gilchrist, Colebrooke and Wilkins – seriously believed Indian languages, law and literature to be the ‘equal’ of the accumulated wisdoms of Europe. Part of their determination to educate their countrymen in Indian cu
lture was to liberate them from excessive dependence on native informants who could use their monopoly of knowledge for untrustworthy ends. Ideally, Hastings would have liked European judges qualified to preside over, or at least perfectly able to understand the proceedings of, Hindu and Muslim courts, which under the regime of the 1770s were still the principal recourse of judgement for the vast majority of Indians. But neither is this to say that his ‘orientalism’ was simply another tool of domination. Hastings and his colleagues took their power as given. What they wanted to do was to exercise it with some sympathy for the place of their government. Was it, for example, the act of a crudely manipulative ‘orientalist’ to sponsor the first English translation of the Bhagavadgita, to make sure its translator got Company leave in Banaras to study Sanskrit and then to provide a preface? In a letter to the chairman of the court of directors, proudly introducing the work, Hastings made it clear that the value of such a translation was not just that it was ‘useful’ for ‘social communication with people over whom we exercise a dominion founded on the right of conquest’. It was also, he wrote in a telling phrase,

  the gain of humanity . . . it attracts and conciliates distant affections; it lessens the weight of the chain by which the natives are held in subjection and it imprints on the hearts of our own countrymen the sense and obligation of benevolence. Even in England this effect of it is greatly wanting. It is not very long since the inhabitants of India were considered by many as creatures, scarcely elevated above the degree of savage life; nor I fear is that prejudice wholly eradicated, though surely abated. Every instance which brings their real character home to observation will impress us with a more generous sense of feeling for their natural rights and teach us to estimate them by the measure of our own. But such instances can only be obtained by their writings and these will survive when the British dominion in India shall have long ceased to exist, and when the sources which it once yielded of wealth and power are lost to remembrance.

  Whether the recipient at Leadenhall Street, Nathaniel Smith, got the message, humane and optimistic as it was, is open to doubt. A few months later Hastings was in England – not as he expected, honoured, but violently and publicly vilified as a ruthless and corrupt martinet. If one were to believe the parliamentary indictment drawn up in the spring of 1786 by Francis’ friend and ally Edmund Burke, so far from conducting his administration wisely and benevolently Hastings had acted with ‘gross injustice, cruelty and treachery against the faith of nations’ (the Afghan Rohillas, whom Burke fantasized as noble horsemen caught in the trap of Hastings’ personal aggrandizement); had turned Awadh ‘which was once a garden [into] an uninhabited desert’; and had indulged ‘a wanton, and unjust and pernicious exercise of his powers and the great situation of trust which he occupied in India in overturning the ancient establishments of the country’. In Burke’s fulmination, the wise owl had been turned into the vulture.

  Though no one, least of all Burke, had the clarity or honesty to see what in fact was obvious, and though the purported charges were all about the Rohillas and Awadh, Warren Hastings was subconsciously being impeached for losing America. Who else was there, after all, to be used as scapegoat? Not King George, who somehow escaped from the ruin of his Atlantic empire with his popularity untarnished; not Cornwallis, who was on his way to succeed Hastings in Calcutta. Putting Hastings in the dock for all kinds of infamies purportedly inflicted on the Indians enabled Britain to exorcise its uneasy conscience about what it had actually done in America. What was said about Hastings would have been more accurately said about Gage’s and Hutchinson’s and Cornwallis’ own ferociously terrorizing Lieutenant-Colonel in the Carolinas, Banastre Tarleton. Hastings was even reproached for having nearly lost British India, when in fact he had saved it. In 1780 he had been facing the triple threat of the Marathas; the aggressive Muslim Sultan of Mysore, Haidar Ali, who would come very close to taking Madras; and the French. At precisely the moment when the British Empire was going down to defeat in the west, it had been the urgency and intelligence of Hastings’ strategy, buying off the Marathas from any temptation of an alliance with Mysore and then pouring troops into south India, that had prevented an ‘American’ disaster from occurring in the east. But since, in the stinging aftermath of Saratoga and Yorktown, it was impossible to criticize those actually responsible for the débâcle, the need to create a home-grown oriental despot – bungling and corrupt – became irresistible. This was the straw man whom Burke indicted as ‘a Pacha with three tails’. ‘Do you want a criminal, my lords?’ he thundered at the impeachment.

  When was there ever so much iniquity ever laid to the charge of any one? . . . I impeach him in the name of all the Commons of Great Britain whose national character he has dishonoured. I impeach him in the name of the people of India whose laws, rights, and liberties he has destroyed, whose country he has laid waste and desolate . . . I impeach him in the name of human nature itself which he has cruelly outraged, injured, and oppressed, in both sexes, in every age, rank, situation and condition of life.

  Anything else? No wonder poor Hastings was confused by his predicament. The man who had surrendered at Yorktown was on his way to the Governor’s House at Calcutta while he himself was in the dock, pilloried as some sort of Ginghiz Khan in knee breeches, fighting for his reputation and his life. At least, unlike the situation with so many scapegoats before, there was no summary rush to judgement. When the ugly mood of post-American chauvinist breast-beating had passed and Britain was once more in a real shooting war with the French, Hastings, having served his turn as whipping boy for wounded national self-esteem, was duly acquitted. But it took ten years of his life, and he never really recovered from the shock and shame. For his part, the plumply well-meaning Cornwallis did what he was supposed to do in India, which was to fly the flag of the chastened but resurgent British Empire as breezily as he could.

  The myth of his predecessor’s infamy was, in fact, necessary to Cornwallis’ pose, provided for him by Burke and by Pitt’s Secretary of State, Henry Dundas, as the sweeper of the Augean stables. He would be the man come to bring True Britishness to India; to hear its groans; to repair the damage done by the occido-oriental despot Hastings. Away, then, with the parasites infesting the revenue department (and away they went). Also, no more of this nonsense about the government going native. Cornwallis’ own view of the Indians’ capacity for government was famously expressed by his statement that ‘every native of India I verily believe is corrupt’. What the country needed was a good stiff dose of reform: not an orientalized Briton but a Britannicized oriental; not an English nawab but a sensible JP in the Governor’s house. And to keep his officials out of the way of temptation, they had to be decently paid and their sphere of action uncontaminated by low matters of trade. Henceforth those who did business and those who governed would be utterly different personnel. From the increasing indifference, even stigma, attached to Company business came a new sense of altered mission for British India. Whatever might be taken from India in the way of commerce would be repaid a thousandfold with something incomparably more precious than silver coin – the blessings of British institutions, the accumulated wisdom of its justice and the sound benevolence of its society. So when Cornwallis looked at the heart of the matter – the land revenues of Bengal – and saw (as there undoubtedly were) criminal abuses and a dismal panorama of dispossessions and famines, he concluded that what he had to do first was to forget all about pandering to native traditions. A new beginning had to be made, one based on sound first principles.

  Those principles were those of the solid English landowner, which, beneath the epaulettes and the frogging, Charles Cornwallis undoubtedly was. To own land, he supposed, was not just proprietorship; it was trust. The progress that could be seen inscribed in every Norfolk village, in every rippling acre of wheat, was owed to the mutually beneficent relationship between the wise, ingenious gentleman–farmer (beginning with Farmer George) and the thrifty, enterprising tenant farmer. (
Never mind, of course, that this happy tableau owed just as much to the brutal dispossessions of eighteenth-century enclosures.) In this smiling, rustic Britannia, the parties to this self-sustaining economic miracle could be assured of reaping the harvest of their efforts through knowledge of the fixity of both their tenure and their taxes. All that was needed to make rural India fortunate was for Cornwallis to provide the necessary measure of stability. Stability, it need hardly be said, was a product of settled social hierarchy. ‘A regular graduation of ranks’, wrote Cornwallis, ‘is nowhere more necessary than in this country for promoting order in civil society.’ It also went without saying that this solid social order would have to be anchored by the Bengali equivalent of the English gentry, who could be depended on to meet their obligations to the government without unduly burdening their tenants. The Governor-General imagined he found them in the zemindars. Historically, under the Mughals, the zemindars had been able to inherit and pass on their land allotments within their families. But this didn’t mean they were true and outright owners of those lands, as in Britain. They had been assigned the income from them (after the emperor had had his due) as tax officials of the empire, not as aristocrats. But for Cornwallis, all these ambiguities were swept aside by his thirst for cleansing simplicity and his indomitably sunny view of the moral invigoration of ownership. So the zemindars were turned into the absolute proprietors of their estates, conditional only on them paying to the government the allotted sum on the appointed day. The assurance of passing on estates to the next generation in England was, after all, the incentive to improve them. Once these ‘landlords’ had some sense of the ceiling of their tax obligations, they could set about becoming model country gentlemen, collecting only so much from their ‘tenants’ (who were, in fact, innocent cultivators, some of whom had owned their own strips and fields) who would be left with a surplus to reinvest in next year’s seed and stock. As the ‘tenants’ became more productive they could produce for the booming cash markets of the towns and an export market hungry for cotton, indigo, sugar and opium. All this would happen, moreover, beneath the mantle of peace and justice provided by an honest and impartial government. Courts based on English law as well as Indian courts would now hear grievances, and government-appointed district officials would protect the natives from extortion and see that the monies collected went where they were supposed to.