by John Keay
Ignoring this advice, the mission continued to lobby the favourite. Again the farman was refused and amidst bitter recriminations against the Khwaja, Surman threatened to withdraw to Bengal. It was now July 1716, a year since the mission had arrived, seven months since the Emperor had been cured, six since the mission had parted with the present – and if anything the farman looked more remote than ever. So much for the oft-repeated story that it was thanks to the surgical skills of William Hamilton that the East India Company stole a march on its European rivals in India.
What did suddenly change the situation was a report from distant Surat to the effect that unless the English mission was satisfied, the Moghul governor there had reason to believe that the Company would withdraw its factories in Gujarat and so, in Surman’s words, ‘that port [Surat] would be ruined’. The threat was genuine enough. The Company’s directors were again questioning the value of their Surat establishment which, unlike Calcutta or Madras, was still unfortified and hence vulnerable to every twitch in the protracted death throes of the Moghul Empire. But Surman had also taken a hand, urging the Bombay government to play up this threat. He appreciated that old reciprocity whereby the Moghul economy was nearly as dependent on the Company’s bullion exports as the Company was on the Moghul’s trade. And he was aware that in the case of Surat, the English presence remained the Moghul’s only guarantee of a safe passage for his shipping in the Arabian Sea.
Thus, even as Surman was writing to Calcutta for permission to break off negotiations, Farrukhsiyar was reading the letter from his Surat governor ‘which not a little startled him’. Suddenly the mission found that doors hitherto locked could be opened at a touch. They were urged to re-present their petition; the earlier objections of the treasury were quashed; the supposedly hostile Wazir eagerly processed the petition, ‘our papers no sooner reaching his hands than they received despatch’; and on 20 November orders were issued for the preparation of the farman. ‘With a little patience and good bribery’, wrote Surman, ‘our business may be now properly said to have received a good foundation; God grant a happy conclusion to the whole.’ It was, he admitted, all thanks to that alarm over English intentions at Surat and, although both patience and bribery still had a big role to play, the farman received the imperial signatures on New Year’s Eve 1716.
Where Captain Hawkins, Sir Thomas Roe, and Sir William Norris had failed, Surman had succeeded. But it was not in his sober nature to exult. A few years previously the Dutch had come away from Delhi with little more than the sort of assurances with which the imperial treasury had tried to fob off the English. More recently the Portuguese had successfully negotiated a substantial concession only to lose it for want of ‘good bribery’ in the final stages of ratification. But now the English had cleared every hurdle and were in possession of a lasting title to the most extensive commercial and territorial privileges ever granted to a foreign power. With a long-drawn sigh of relief Surman wrote of his ‘inexpressible satisfaction’. There were of course further delays: the Khwaja again alienated his companions by trying to elicit some personal advantage; the Emperor desired that Dr Hamilton remain in his service and was little reassured by the latter’s insistence that he must first go to England to replenish his medicines; and many fine points of protocol delayed the final exchange of presents. As a result the mission departed just as the monsoon broke and did not reach Patna till September and Calcutta till December 1717. There Surman finally closed his excruciating diary with a plea that has been little regarded.
There is no other way of coming to a clear knowledge how this grand affair has suceeded than by a serious scrutiny and perusal of this book from the beginning to the end, for which purpose we heartily and humbly commend it to the Honourable President and Council of Bengal; for since we have acted directly under their influence, to them alone must be imputed the glory. Since the trade of Europeans in these parts [began], there have been sundry attempts of this kind, but the grants obtained have been of very little value though at a much superior expense. May those that we have gained be as lasting as they are great is our earnest wish.
The farman would indeed be treasured. But not so Surman’s diary. In the early 1750s some pages from the original were ‘picked up in a public necessary house [lavatory] which the writers make use of’ (J. Long).
ii
News of Surman’s success had reached Calcutta in May 1717. The new president, Robert Hedges, (a nephew of Agent William Hedges who had fallen foul of Job Charnock in pre-Calcutta days), promptly declared a public rejoicing. ‘Agreed that next Wednesday we make a public dinner for all the Company’s servants and a loud noise with our cannon and conclude the day with bonfires and other demonstrations of joy.’ But although Surman wished all the credit for Bengal, the original initiative had come from Madras while the conclusive threat had come from Bombay/Surat. All the Presidencies felt equally involved and all received the news with equal satisfaction.
Nowhere were the celebrations more lavish than in Madras where a copy of the imperial farman was carried round the city in the Governor’s state palanquin accompanied by the Mayor and Aldermen on horseback. A company of foot soldiers escorted them, and all the English merchants plus ‘all the English music’ followed behind. At each of the city’s gates the document was held aloft and a proclamation read out to the effect that here was the imperial farman confirming all the Honourable Company’s former grants and privileges and adding such extensive new privileges ‘with the possession of several lands in many parts of India with such favour as has never before been granted to any European nation’. There followed a grand procession to the ‘Tiping Garden’ and a magnificent dinner with a ‘bonefire’ and ‘feasting of the soldiers with tubs of punch’ – total cost 1022 pagodas. All afternoon a deafening cannonade was in progress as a 151-gun salute from the shore batteries was taken up by the Marlborough, the largest ship in port, ‘and when he was done, all the Europe ships in the road one after another, and the country ships upon the Europe ships finishing fired all together as fast as they could, the ships being handsomely dressed out with their colours and streamers’. This performance was repeated during dinner with additional salutes for each loyal toast to the Emperor, the King, the Company, etc.
Such extravagant celebrations were partly designed to impress the Moghul’s provincial Nawabs; habitual oppressors of the Company, they were to note the extraordinary esteem in which the Emperor now held the English and the important new favours he had granted them. But it was not all bravado. At the time the Company’s servants were genuinely excited by the terms of the farman; they construed them as giving their Honourable masters a winning advantage over their European rivals and as giving themselves, as private traders, unprecedented opportunities of exploiting the ‘country trade’. Subsequently the value of the imperial concession, if anything, appreciated. By 1737 ‘our dear bought farman’ had acquired an almost sacrosant character and in 1756 it was by citing the unfulfilled clauses of the farman that Robert Clive justified his march to Plassey. A decade later Clive would up the British stakes in India by obtaining the diwani, or governorship, of Bengal; but until that day the 1717 farman remained ‘the Magna Carta of the Company in India’.
And all this in spite of the fact that within a year of Surman’s return to Bengal Emperor Farrukhsiyar’s brief reign was over. Deposed, imprisoned and blinded by the Sayyad brothers, in 1719 he was finally put out of his misery by strangulation. There followed two years of intrigue and bloodshed remarkable even by the grisly standards of the later Moghul Empire. In an opiate daze one epicene youth was bundled on to the throne only to be replaced within weeks by another consumptive apology-for-an-emperor who in turn coughed his last within a couple of months. Meanwhile anti-Emperors took the field and even the deaths of the string-pulling Sayyad brothers – they were, of course, murdered – failed to restore the imperial dignity. Thereafter all Moghul emperors were but puppets and ciphers. Whereas Aurangzeb and Farrukhsiyar’s other illustr
ious predecessors had never deigned to grant a general farman, his wretched successors would never have dared to. The Company’s timing had been impeccable.
On the other hand the English could forget about the idea of ever appealing to Delhi for the enforcement of their newly won privileges. In 1739 the Persian, Nadir Shah, occupied the capital and decamped with the Peacock Throne; thereafter the marble halls and sandstone galleries of Moghul might were desecrated by every conquering horde that camped by the Jumna river. After Surman, the next British party to enter Delhi’s Red Fort on official business carried guns instead of presents and rather than flatter the incumbent emperor simply kidnapped him. The imperial seal retained its validity as the insignia of sovereignty and legitimacy, but in practice it was more ignored and defied than respected.
Under such circumstances it should come as no surprise that for the next two decades the story of English activities in India, and especially in Bengal, is largely one of abortive endeavours to enforce the terms of the farman and of bitter quarrels over their precise meaning. Technically there were in fact three farman, one of which was addressed to the Moghul governors and officials in Bengal, another to those of Hyderabad (within which province fell Madras and the Company’s other settlements on The Coast), and the third to Ahmadabad (i.e. Gujarat including Surat). Each included a number of directives concerning the privileges to which the Company was entitled; some of these directives appeared in all three farman, others dealt with specific local concessions.
In the case of Bengal, the question (which had so exercised Agent Hedges) of commuting the ad valorem customs dues in favour of an annual lump sum payment of 3000 rupees (considerably less than the cost of those farman celebrations) was conceded. Similarly the grant of the three villages which comprised Calcutta was confirmed. Additionally a further thirty-eight villages, including some like Howrah on the other side of the Hughli river, were to be made available to the Company. There were two currency directives, one of which gave to rupees coined by the Company in Madras parity with those minted by the Bengal government, while the other entitled the Company to use the Bengal mint to turn its bullion into coin. Additionally there were two extra-territorial directives obliging the Bengal administration to apprehend and hand over any stolen goods, thieves, or debtors on whom the Company had a claim. Finally, besides a number of minor provisions, there was an important clause exempting all goods carried under a pass (dastak) issued by the Company’s chief factors from being stopped, examined, or taxed anywhere within Bengal.
In a later age and another land these terms might have been called capitulations. But if the Moghul had capitulated, his increasingly independent nawabs, diwans and subahdars in the provinces certainly had not. Of all these directives not one was conceded without argument and not a few were never conceded at all.
The thirty-eight villages, for instance, were firmly withheld on orders from the Nawab. In Madras, as will be seen, similar prevarication in respect of villages granted under the farman led to open hostilities. But in Bengal the Company had to content itself with trying to arrange for the villages in question to be acquired by its Indian dependants. This was only partially successful and may help to explain why Fort William proved so vulnerable when it came to the great trial of strength in 1756.
If Calcutta could not immediately secure the adjacent villages (or zamindari) it could to some extent neutralize them by a strict exercise of its new rights to extra-territorial jurisdiction. A test case arose as early as 1719 when a Hindu who had speculated in Calcutta real estate absconded owing unspecified rents to the Company. He was tracked down in a neighbouring zamindari but when the Company’s barquandaz (described as ‘country gunmen’ but evidently a rural militia) came in hot pursuit they were attacked and repulsed. The Company thereupon seized hostages from the defiant zamindar and he in turn apprehended some of the Company’s tenants and plundered one of its agents. ‘Such insolent treatment’ could not be allowed to go unpunished. With a force of ninety foot and horse Captain Row was immediately ordered to the scene of the trouble. The zamindar again followed suit by raising a force of his own; it was put at over a thousand. But, in a series of skirmishes heavy with portent, the untrained, ill-armed levies of the zamindar were easily routed. ‘We destroyed a great number of their people’, reported Row, ‘and burnt their villages which has at length obliged them to beg for peace on any terms.’ The original debtor was surrendered, the hostages exchanged, and the zamindar’s force disbanded. ‘We make no doubt’, recorded the Calcutta Council, ‘that this good effect will be a warning to other zamindars not only to refuse protection to any of our tenants, but also to deliver them up to us when demanded…’
Of course it was one thing to try strong-arm tactics with a neighbouring landlord, quite another to challenge the Nawab. Disregard of the farman’s currency concessions furnished ample provocation from this direction, but as yet the Company always chose to pay up rather than square up. No headway was made on the abolition of the unfavourable exchange rate for rupees minted in Madras. In fact in 1736 the batta, or discount, charged on them was nearly doubled. Squeals of protest from Calcutta eventually won a reduction but the disparity remained. Its object was clear enough – to encourage the Company to import the silver used to pay for its Bengal trade investment in the form of bullion rather than coin. And such an arrangement would also have suited the Company had it ever managed to secure that access to the Bengal mint which had been promised in the farman. But this too was consistently withheld. A cosy monopoly consisting of the Nawab and his Hindu bankers controlled the mint in an exclusive arrangement which they found both profitable and politic. By occasionally refusing to accept bullion they could quickly bring a European trading company to heel or, more often, to a lucrative accommodation. And should such a company try to hold out by borrowing money for its current investment, it would invariably find that the only loan available was from the same monopoly.
Thus did the Bengal treasury maintain a tight hold on the province’s money supply, and all foreigners, not excepting the privileged English, did well to remember it. It was an important check, for in all other aspects the economy of Bengal was becoming increasingly – indeed decisively – dependent on the foreign companies. The English Company’s trade in Bengal was already equal to that of all other foreign trading companies together and during the period 1717-27 it more than doubled; from contributing forty per cent of the Honourable Company’s total imports, Bengal’s share now rose to seventy per cent; and there can be no doubt that these dramatic improvements were all down to the greater security and improved trading terms associated with the farman.
But such statistics tell only half the tale. The other half, more difficult to quantify, is the undoubted increase in the volume and value of the ‘country trade’ conducted by the English. Almost every European in the East, be he ensign or ambassador, prelate or president, engaged in some branch of trade on his own account. The salaries paid its employees by the English Company were still miserly – £200 per annum for a president, £5 per annum for a writer. Even with generous allowances for subsistence and servants it was impossible to live in comfort, let alone make a fortune, without speculating in trade. And this was, of course, even truer of those ‘private traders’ who were not in the employ of any company. But the term ‘private trade’ had by this time become misleading. It could denote anything from the modest cargo space allowed by the Company to its factors and ships’ captains on voyages to and from Europe to the entire evil-smelling contents of a Hughli barge that would never leave the river, or a part share in a many-decked Surat galleon sailing for the Red Sea.
‘Country trade’ was slightly more specific in that it denoted any trading activity that began and ended east of the Cape of Good Hope (so excluding St Helena and all European ports). This was the vast trading world, extending from Mocha to Manila, which the Company now accepted as being as legitimate a sphere of activity for its own servants as for those private traders, both Eu
ropean and native, who were outside its employ. All such traders and all such ventures were supposed to be registered in the Company’s books and from them it derived a considerable income in the form of customs duties. Additionally, from 1718 a consulage fee of two per cent was levied on all exports from Calcutta.
Nevertheless, it is almost impossible to distinguish private trade or even country trade from that of the Company. An examination of the shipping records for Madras suggests that the number of Company ships calling there was greatly exceeded by the number of ships that did not belong to the Company. Of the latter some are described as Indian, Armenian or Burmese but this did not preclude their officers being European or their cargoes being all or partly the ventures of European syndicates. Similarly even Company vessels often carried private cargoes since they were commonly leased out pending the favourable season for sailing home. From an examination of the detailed records kept by the Dutch at their Cochin factory, one writer has concluded that the tonnage of ‘English country-shipping’ more than doubled in the period 1724-42. And this leads him to an interesting conclusion: it was not the Company’s ‘out and back’ trade but ‘the steadily increasing participation in the maritime trade of Asia by Europeans in partnership – voluntary and involuntary – with local traders and seamen [which] was the foundation upon which the imperialism of more recent times was built’ (H. Furber).
The country trade, then, offered Europeans a lucrative field of speculation that was both legitimate and of some commercial and political significance. Such activity only became reprehensible when someone who engaged in it abused his official position as an employee of, say, the Honourable Company to gain unfair advantage. Typical of such abuses was the use of the Company’s money to finance a private investment, or the purchase by Company employees of goods supplied by these same employees as private traders. All those detected in such practices could expect to be dismissed from the Company’s service. But there were other areas in which the Company’s men enjoyed considerable advantage and where the modalities were far less clear.
