Honourable Company: A History of The English East India Company

by John Keay

  The period was frankly a trifle dull and, worse still, it appeared that that steady march towards eventual dominion in India – often the English historian’s sole reason for following the Company’s otherwise tiresome career – had ground to a halt. Instead here was the Company turning its back on a manifest destiny and channelling its energies into such pettifogging irrelevancies as teas and taffetas, batta and dastak (whatever they were). Happily it was, though, only an aberration. The halt, we are to believe, was merely recuperative; indeed the steady tramp towards dominion was soon to turn into a stampede. India after Aurangzeb was becoming a political vacuum, the French were eager to fill it, and Clive’s hour was nigh. After 150 years of ‘jarres and brabbles’ a new and exciting age was beckoning. If pour mieux sauter the Company must perhaps reculer for a few decades, not so the historian.

  This leap-frogging of more than a generation is responsible for the idea of a second coming for the British in India, the impression being that the Company as a trading corporation slipped into dozy oblivion, buried beneath the weight of its own piece goods, sometime around 1710, only to rise again as a thrusting military enterprise unencumbered by past misdeeds and bursting with patriotic fervour in the 1750s. And certainly a sea change is evident. But this notion of a second coming leaves far too many questions unanswered. How, for instance, did the garrisons, seldom more than 300 strong, which paced the parapets of Forts St George and William suddenly become armies able to contest vast chunks of the subcontinent? Or how did the pirate-plagued marine of Bombay become a formidable navy? When did the ‘Consultations’ books of the various Presidencies cease to be filled with complaints about last year’s consignment of Madeira or what the awful Waite called Bombay’s ‘unveryhealthfull’ climate and come instead to dwell on matters of state and realpolitik? It would be interesting to know, too, how and why expatriate communities of comfort-loving merchants came to master their habitual bickering and ‘incorrigible sottishness’ and to work in concert for the creation of an empire. How was such a role change legitimized; and how come that an association of London businessmen, so naturally cautious, so very distrustful of their overseas agents, and so desperate to avoid political commitments and military overheads, came to countenance such extraordinary developments?

  Unfortunately these crucial questions defy either brief or simple answers; there is much to be said for the traditional view that the Company’s transformation was simply a necessary gesture of self-defence in the face of French provocation and Indian chaos. But there were also straws in the wind, hints and harbingers of things to come, which suggested a new sort of relationship with the native powers in India and a new sense of solidarity between the Company’s three Indian Presidencies. They date back to the days of Governor Pitt in Madras.

  Although Pitt had scathingly disparaged the New Company’s grand embassy to the Moghul under Sir William Norris – indeed he had done much to undermine it – he was evidently impressed by the idea of reapplying for that long-cherished farman. Such a grant, confirming all the Company’s commercial and territorial privileges under the imperial seal, would elevate its legal standing to a constitutionality equivalent to that of the various Nawabs and Governors with whom it was habitually embroiled. Such functionaries issued, or more often withheld, their own grants in the form of kaul, sanad, parwannah, and nishan but an imperial farman would technically trump them all. Although it might not guarantee immunity from local impositions it would certainly legitimize opposition to them.

  Pitt appreciated that so long as the implacable Aurangzeb lived, the farman was a lost cause. He nevertheless prepared for better times by carefully cultivating connections at the imperial court. Thus in 1707, when the old emperor at last died, there arrived at Fort St George a most encouraging letter from one Ziau-ud-Din whom Pitt knew as The Moghul’s Lord High Steward. Evidently the new emperor, Shah Alam, feared that his brother and main rival for the Peacock Throne was heading for Madras. If Governor Pitt could see his way to opposing and perhaps even capturing the traitor, the Emperor might easily be persuaded to grant the farman, nay he might go further and grant the Company additional facilities, like a few islands off the Arakan coast or perhaps Pulicat, the erstwhile Dutch factory on the Coromandel Coast.

  ‘I cannot but blush when I think of giving you further trouble,’ replied Pitt in suitably unctuous tone. The Arakan islands were of no interest to merchants but there was an island, Divi, just off Masulipatnam which would do very nicely; and instead of Pulicat, would it be possible to substitute San Thomé, the old Portuguese town just down the beach from Fort St George? Of course, the main thing was the farman itself. It must be ‘generall’, that is it must include the Company’s privileges in Bengal and Surat as well as Madras. And that reminded him. The Company would appreciate the privilege of establishing a mint at Calcutta for turning its silver imports into coin; and there was still the old problem of unauthorized stoppages of its trade on the river journey up to Patna. The farman would also be a good opportunity to stop, once and for all, the liberties habitually taken by the customs officers at Surat. They were the slowest and most rapacious in India and they still insisted on the indignity of a body search ‘more becoming slaves rather than merchants’. “Tis your noble and generous mind which has drawn this trouble of our application to you’, began Pitt’s second letter on the subject. He appreciated that a substantial present must needs be sent to the Emperor along with whoever went to receive the farman; indeed such a present was already being assembled. In the meantime he had a few more favours to ask…

  Back in London the directors marvelled at their Governor’s initiative and urged him to stay on at Fort St George to see it through. The present for the Emperor, consisting of elephants, cannon and all the usual cornucopia of clocks, musical boxes, silverware and precious fabrics, was dispatched to Calcutta for forwarding to Delhi; and the Bengal factors were invited to append their own shopping list of favours to that already drawn up by Pitt. But, perhaps piqued by Madras’s having made the running and certainly hamstrung by their own indecision (Calcutta still suffered under a rotation Council which changed every week), the Bengal factors failed to respond. Meanwhile, against their better judgement, the Court of Directors had recalled Thomas Pitt following an unseemly row with his advisory council.

  In the following year, 1710, Ziau-ud-Din was appointed to the governorship of Hughli whence he renewed his overtures, this time to nearby Calcutta. Simultaneously the Company’s rotation government there was at last being wound up and a new President was being installed in Fort William. This was none other than Captain Anthony Weltden, once of the Curtana, who had somehow cleared his name of the Mergui disaster and of collusion with ‘Siamese’ White, and was now deemed just the man to sort out Bengal’s always dismal rivalries. Weltden, however, had other ideas. ‘His term of governing was very short’, recalled Alexander Hamilton, ‘but he took as short a way to be enriched by it, harassing the people to fill his coffers’; his legendary reputation for peculation was achieved during a mere seven months in office.

  It thus fell to his successor, John Russel, a grandson of Oliver Cromwell, to respond to the new offer of applying for the farman. By 1712 the cannon and the candelabra had been dusted off (the elephants had been sold) and the whole present was loaded on boats for the first leg of the journey up-country. From Madras came good wishes, not untinged with jealousy, that Russel might have ‘the sole honour of accomplishing what so many able and experienced persons have attempted in vain’. Who, the Madras President asked, would have expected the Act of Union between Scotland and England; after more than a century of fruitless endeavour it had passed in 1707. ‘We ought never to despair of succeeding.’ But it was hard not to. For from another quarter came news that aborted the whole enterprise: the Emperor Shah Alam was dead.

  Throughout 1712, in the sort of blood-letting that accompanied every succession crisis of the later Moghuls, the sons of the deceased Emperor mobilized the might of the empire
to contest amongst themselves for the vacant throne. One, lately Nawab of Bengal where he had shown the Company many favours, was forced over a precipice on his elephant; another died in battle; a third briefly gained the throne only to be defeated and strangled before the year was out. The new claimant, Farrukhsiyar, was a son of the late Nawab and news of his unexpected success occasioned great excitement in Calcutta. Again the farman seemed a possibility, again the plate and glass of the Company’s present was dusted down. For Farrukhsiyar was young, amenable, and an excellent sportsman; he had spent his childhood in Bengal where the Company had appointed itself supplier of toys to the royal nursery, and he was known to many of the Company’s servants.

  But this being the case, they were also aware of his shortcomings. ‘All his most noticeable characteristics’, wrote one, ‘are connected with his excellence of body.’ As a horseman he was unsurpassed but as a statesman he was dull-witted, dilatory and fickle. But for his formidable mother he would never have contested the throne and but for two king-making brothers, the Sayyads, he would never have won it. As Chief Minister (Wazir) and Chief of Staff (Amir-ul-Umara), the Sayyads now managed the empire while Farrukhsiyar surrounded himself with an assortment of favourites and malcontents who busily intrigued against them. Rival posses roamed the streets of Delhi on the off chance of waylaying a dignitary of the opposing faction; the Emperor took to absenting himself on religious and sporting excursions. Such then was the strife-torn capital and such the factious government to which in 1713 the Company finally determined to send its mission to treat for the cherished farman.

  News that the English had some forty tons of exotica awaiting dispatch to Delhi naturally delighted a young emperor for whom the pleasures of office entirely obscured the responsibilities. Of course it must be forwarded immediately, and he therefore issued the Company with an interim confirmation of its privileges and ordered passes, armed guards, and free carriage for the entire mission from Patna, where it was assembling, to Delhi.

  But this obviated neither the delays nor the expense of mounting such an undertaking. John Surman, the conscientious but unexciting factor who had been delegated to lead the mission, wanted to be sure of a favourable reception in Delhi and to that end protracted negotiations were opened between Khwaja Sarhad, his Armenian interpreter and second in command, and the Khwaja’s rather dubious contacts at court. For his part, the Khwaja was profoundly worried about the mission’s security across 800 miles of disturbed and bandit-ridden country. As well as a contingent of Company troops and the detachment of imperial foot and horse, further guards were recruited and further sums disbursed to buy off likely adversaries. Then there was the usual complication that any orders from the court in Delhi had to be supported by generous cash inducements before the local authorities would act on them; there was also the question of whether free carriage could be construed as applying to the several tons of piece goods and broadcloth which the mission was proposing to sell in Delhi in order to defray its costs; and there was the purely logistic complication of assembling such a vast caravan. Thus fully a year slipped by in Patna before in April 1715 the cavalcade finally took the high road for Upper India.

  Carrying the present and the mission’s trade goods 160 bullock carts, each loaded with half a ton, creaked along in single file. Twenty-two more oxen hauled the cannon, also destined for the Emperor, while 1200 porters bent beneath an assortment of loads which included the mission’s chintz-lined tents and a selection of richly furnished palanquins. Amidst this concourse, ten hackeries, some fifteen camels and an assortment of horses and ponies jostled for road space. The troops, to a total of 600, patrolled the flanks and guarded front and rear. In all the caravan must have been fully a mile long; when in early May it reached the Ganges at Benares, the mission’s diary records four days of ‘ferrying over our goods’.

  On the third day they were overtaken by what Surman calls ‘a prodigious storm of wind and rain’. One imagines the palanquins cartwheeling across the sand dunes, oxen stampeding, and the ferry capsizing as cannon careered across its decks. But all the laconic Surman records is ‘some damaging of our goods’. Next day he announces ‘We passed the City of Benares.’ They had spent four days camped before one of the most famous skylines in the world and had crossed the sacred Ganges at its holiest point. Now they were circumventing the great city of Shiva, the home of Hindu scholarship and the greatest place of pilgrimage in India. It was also an important manufacturing centre. Yet the diary is silent, recording neither admiration nor revulsion, just ‘We passed the City of Benares’.

  And so, to the historian’s intense annoyance, it continued. Two uneventful weeks later they ‘arrived on the banks of the Ganges before Allahabad’. They crossed in three days; this time there was not even a storm to raise a ripple of interest. May gave way to June, the hottest month in the north Indian calendar. The dust and discomfort can only have been appalling; they merit not a mention. June 18th found the mission at ‘Raj Ghat over against Agra’. All that here separated them from the great white cloud which is the Taj Mahal was the Jumna river, at this time of year a warm and wadable brook. But all that the diary records is that here they ‘proclaimed King George’; news had just reached them from Calcutta of the death of Queen Anne and the accession of the first Hanoverian.

  Three nights later the camp was entered by robbers. ‘We had five men wounded and took two of the rogues.’ Another thief was surprised two days later. It was significant that the nearer they approached to the imperial capital the more dangerous was the countryside.

  On 6July 1715, a creditable three months since leaving Patna, the mission made its ceremonial entry into Shahjhanabad (now Old Delhi). With flags, elephants and 200 cavalry, an imperial official conducted them straight to the Red Fort where, after a wait, Farrukhsiyar made an appearance and deigned to accept the first instalment of his present. This was by way of an appetizer consisting of 1001 gold coins, a clock set with precious stones, ‘an unicorn’s horn’ (rhinoceros’s?), a gold escritoire, a large lump of ambergris, the inevitable ewer and basin, and a massive globe, more than six feet in diameter, inlaid with gold and silver, and with the place names thoughtfully written in Persian. All went off smoothly and Khan Dauran, the Emperor’s favourite courtier and a man strongly recommended by Khwaja Sarhad, hinted at an early and favourable outcome. Surman quickly passed on the good tidings in a letter to Calcutta. ‘Considering the great pomp and state of the Kings of Hindustan’, he wrote, ‘we was very well received.’

  A week later Surman was even more confident that ‘all will end well’. Governor Pitt’s old friend, Ziau-ud-Din, had assured him that they were correct in concentrating on the favourite, Khan Dauran, rather than on the unpopular Sayyad who was Wazir. This was precisely what Khwaja Sarhad, the mission’s mercurial Armenian, had been saying and for once the much maligned Khwaja was in a tolerable humour. Surman and his three English colleagues – a deputy, a secretary and a doctor – were all in some awe of the Armenian, whose multifarious interests and shady associates often threatened to bring the whole affair into disrepute. But unlike the Englishmen, the Khwaja was not an employee of the Honourable Company; he was on a straight commission – 50,000 rupees if the farman was granted. This tended to make him excellent company when things were going well but evasive, secretive and altogether exasperating whenever a reverse was in prospect – and, as soon appeared, a reverse was in prospect most of the time.

  The first problem was the Emperor’s apparent indifference to the English and their present now that he had both safely installed in his capital. Accordingly, in August His Majesty disappeared on a month-long tour of the neighbouring Punjab, returned only to take to his sick bed, and rose from it only to get married. No sooner was the marriage ceremony over than he took to his bed once again. Needless to say, all public business, including the tedious petition of the English Company, was suspended throughout this period. It was November before Farrukhsiyar felt up to presiding over his interrupted n
uptial festivities and at last taking delivery of the mission’s present.

  This four-month delay severely tested both Surman’s patience and the Khwaja’s humour. But it did produce an unexpected opening in that William Hamilton, the mission’s doctor, was invited to prescribe for the Emperor. Initially Farrukhsiyar’s complaint, no doubt the result of sexual excess, manifested itself in two large swellings in the groin. Hamilton successfully treated them and thus, in the patient’s words, ‘became privy to my nakedness’. This close relationship was renewed when the imperial tumours reappeared. Again Hamilton’s ministrations proved effective and the Emperor was uncommonly grateful, showering Hamilton with favours and presents, including an elephant and a set of surgical instruments with shafts of solid gold.

  There is, however, no evidence that the Emperor felt indebted to the mission as a whole nor that Hamilton was able to put his privileged position to any use in the matter of the farman. On the contrary, when along with the present the English at last submitted their detailed petition, it was simply referred to the clerks of the imperial treasury. More bribes changed hands but the treasury’s comments on each of the nineteen articles merely queried precedents or implied that no farman was needed. A second petition designed to simplify the request fared no better. It was clear that Khan Dauran, the Emperor’s favourite, had failed. After nine wasted months and many thousands of wasted rupees, Surman was advised to reapply through the Wazir.