by John Keay
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Too Loyal, Too Faithful
HASTINGS’S INDIA
Concluding a history of the East India Company poses the sort of problems faced by the biographer of a long-lived celebrity. After a suitably paced narrative covering the subject’s active life, the question arises of how to present the empty decades of disengagement and retirement when, with failing faculties and supported gait, the public persona fades into the obscurity of an irrelevant old age. One solution is to fill this blank by anticipating the later progress of the ideas and institutions spawned by the subject. But in the case of the Company this would mean charting the history of the British Empire in the East, a daunting task which has not been neglected by others.
Alternatively the declining years can be simply condensed into a short and serene graveside epilogue. Again, though, the Company does not lend itself to this treatment. To reach the graveside means leaping six decades and alighting amid the far from serene scenes of the ‘Indian Mutiny’. For these the Company and its erstwhile overlord, the Moghul Emperor, would be made scapegoats; the latter was exiled, the former dissolved. Both institutions were by then, however, long moribund as anything other than constitutional conveniences. The Company no more resembled ‘the Grandest Society of Merchants in the Universe’ than did Bahadur Shah, ‘the little old man of Delhi’, his illustrious predecessors on the Peacock Throne.
Even after its final dissolution in 1858 the Company, though divested of its fictive powers, would obstinately refuse to die. With its operational expenses pared down to a few hundred pounds per annum, and with no fixed abode after the demolition of India House in 1862, it wandered, doddery and destitute as an Indian sannyasi, from one temporary address to another. Not till 1873 was it finally wound up and not till 1884, exactly a century after Pitt’s India Act, was the last cheque to be drawn on the East India Stock Dividend Account honoured by the Bank of England.
It is, then, difficult to fix a precise date for the demise of the Company. If by demise is meant its supersession by the state, any number of dates could be suggested ranging from the infiltration of the Directorate in the 1760s to the 1773 Regulating Act, the 1784 India Act, the 1813 Charter Act (which finally claimed for the Crown the sovereignty of all the Company’s possessions), or the 1858 dissolution.
A similar calendar, beginning with Plassey or Baksar and ending with the reforms of Cornwallis and Shore, could be constructed for the transformation of the Company from commercial enterprise into administrative service. But here an added complication arises in that while the state was successfully challenging the Company’s political independence and while reforms were transforming it into a more effective branch of government, its commercial privileges were being upheld. When they too were eventually challenged it was on quite different grounds and accorded with yet another calendar. It was not until 1813 that the Company’s trade with India was thrown open to competitors and not until 1833 that the same happened with the China trade.
This suggests, though, a possible line of retreat. The Company’s exclusive trading rights had always been its most prized possession. The essence of Queen Elizabeth’s founding charter, its privileged monopoly of eastern trade, had been confirmed in every subsequent charter and without it the Company ceased to be a recognizable society of merchants. On the other hand, so long as it possessed all or part of that monopoly, so long as Company ships loaded pepper at Benkulen and tea at Canton, so long as the directors erupted over the slightest deviation in the quality of a Dhaka muslin, and so long as their servants saw in every desert island another off-shore entrepôt, talk of the Company’s demise was premature. Nor in these days of growing political responsibilities was trade a purely marginal activity. ‘For financial reasons’, writes Louis Dermigny, ‘control of India necessitated control of the tea trade.’ Arguably and ironically it would be the Company’s sensational commercial success in China as a result of the 1784 Commutation Act that made possible the creation of British India.
First, though, something remains to be said of the extent to which this Indian dominion was the product of Company, as opposed to Government, policy. After Pitt’s India Act the direction of Indian affairs would rest with the Government’s new Board of Control which, under the forceful Dundas, would soon infringe the few discretionary powers supposedly left to Leadenhall Street. But before this, during the twilight years of debate and defiance which intervened between the Acts of North and Pitt, the Company in India had weathered its stormiest decade to emerge with a profile almost unrecognizable from that of 1770. Then Clive had just left Bengal after his final brief administration. He had been succeeded, after a couple of years and a couple of governors, by Warren Hastings who as Governor of Bengal and then, under the Regulating Act, as Governor-General, controlled the Company’s destinies in India for thirteen years. Subsequent governors-general would owe their appointments more to Whitehall than India House and would almost invariably be chosen from outside the Company. Hastings was therefore the only governor-general of any stature to emerge from the Company’s ranks. The first governor-general, he was also the last of the Company’s proconsuls; and, arguably, he was the greatest.
No other governor-general or viceroy would last anything like as long as Hastings and no other would approach his profound understanding of India or his affection for its peoples. ‘The Great Moghul’, as Hastings was called in Calcutta’s first newspaper, stood alone, a sad and self-righteous Caesar, embattled but unbowed, solicitous but ruthless, fastidious but careless, lofty yet devious – a man, in short, crying out to be misunderstood. Contemporaries duly obliged; so has posterity. For acting in what he believed to be the best interests of his employers he was impeached by Parliament. Though he was honourably acquitted, the next generation arraigned him for failings that were moderate by contemporary standards and for sympathies which now seem wonderfully enlightened. When eventually the Raj did claim him for its own it was on the basis of those policies which were not of his choosing. And even today his reputation rests on the two seemingly irreconcilable assertions that he was both the architect of British India and the one ruler of British India to whom the creation of such an entity was anathema.
None of this is altogether surprising if some allowance is made for the simple fact that Hastings was no more prescient than other mortals. If he had a model for Bengal it was inspired not by dreams of British empire but by what he took to be the traditions of Moghul empire. Outlining his proposed reforms to the Chairman of the Company he stressed that they included ‘not one which the original constitution of the Mogul Empire hath not before established…and rendered familiar to the people’. He would ‘found the authority of the British government in Bengal on its [Bengal’s] ancient laws’. India was, had been, ‘a great nation’; its people were ‘not in a savage state’ and they had little to gain from the imposition of ‘a superior wisdom from outside’. India should be administered by Indians and in accordance with Indian custom although, in Bengal at least, a British supremacy consisting of the Governor and Council in Calcutta should replace that of the Moghul Nawab and his court in Murshidabad.
In thus disclaiming any idea of direct British rule, Hastings stood shoulder to shoulder with Vansittart, Clive, and just about every other servant of the Company. But unlike Clive and Vansittart, Hastings had little influence or support outside the Company. He was a complete Company man with all that that implies in the way of personal ambition, resourcefulness, impatience of London’s control, and an adventurer’s eye for opportunity. His impeachment he would rightly see as ‘less my trial than that of the East India Company and [thinking presumably of his accusers] of the British nation’. But by then, old and embittered, he too was a political irrelevance, just like the Company.
This identity between the servant and his honourable masters had been marked throughout his career. Entering the Company as a £5 per annum writer in 1750, he had known a Bengal which was still under the able Nawab Aliverdi Khan a
nd a Calcutta which was just one of the province’s several beleaguered European trading posts. When, six years later, Siraj-ud-Daula stormed Calcutta, Hastings had typically been checking piece goods on the ‘factory’ floor of one of the Company’s outlying aurungs (depots). He thus escaped the débacle of the evacuation and the Black Hole and, though briefly arrested, managed to operate as an informant at the Nawab’s capital. Later, after Clive and Watson had wreaked their revenge, he continued his unspectacular rise through the Company’s civilian ranks. As one of Henry Vansittart’s councillors he became closely identified with the ill-fated policy of installing Mir Kasim as a more effective alternative to Clive’s Mir Jafar and of curtailing the damage caused by the abuse of dastak. From such schemes he also profited and when he resigned, for the first time, in 1765 he had amassed £30,000. By the standards of the day this was an unremarkable fortune which justified neither his critics’ talk of rapacity nor his supporters’ claims of incorruptibility.
Reinstatement came in 1769 as a reward for his impressive defence of the Company delivered before the first of Parliament’s Select Committees of Enquiry. With the support of that Company diehard, Lawrence Sulivan, henceforth his indefatigable ally in Leadenhall Street, Hastings was sent to Madras as Second-in-Council. There he invested in the Madras Association which had succeeded to Jourdain, Sulivan and de Souza’s virtual monopoly of the trade with Aceh. Officially he was also Export Warehousekeeper and in this role he busied himself with reforming the system of ordering and collecting the annual investment in piece goods. Once again he was knee deep in cottons when disaster struck. This time it was the loss of the Aurora and of the three-man commission which sailed in her. Experience, ability and authority all told in the appointment of Hastings to the governorship of Bengal where he was to ‘stand forth as diwan’, to effect ‘the complete reformation’ that had been expected from the ill-fated Commissioners, and to end Bengal’s crippling drain on the Company’s finances. Interpreting these vague instructions as a carte blanche Hastings arrived in Bengal in 1772 determined to return the government to its ‘first principles’.
These ‘first principles’, though supposedly derived from Moghul precedent, have a familiar ring. The Nawab’s residual administration, overlaid by a proliferation of Company agents and revenue officials, meant that Bengal was being hopelessly over-governed and over-mulcted. Whether to encourage what would now be called a free market economy or whether to reduce the amount of revenue lost in the process of collection, a retraction of both the Nawab’s and the Company’s agents plus a degree of centralization was vital. Accordingly the Nawab’s deputies in Bengal and Bihar were dismissed and sent for trial; his system of civil and criminal courts was taken over and reformed with special emphasis being placed on the study and codification of Hindu and Muslim law; and his Treasury, now administered by a board of Company servants, was removed from Murshidabad to closer supervision in Calcutta. In a re-enactment of the arrangement reached with Mir Kasim, all inland customs posts were also withdrawn and all dastak abolished in favour of a small flat rate duty. This last supposedly ended the privileged position of Company servants and free merchants vis-à-vis other European and Indian merchants. Certain items, though, notably salt and opium, were made a Company monopoly which, while affording the Company a new source of revenue, also gave to those to whom such monopolies were farmed ample opportunities of enrichment.
Similar opportunities continued to be exploited in the revenue collection which was also thrown open to competitive tendering. Unlike Clive, Hastings did not rant about ‘Augean stables’ and in fact he consistently resisted pressures from home to organize an inquisition into past malpractices. Servants of a merchant company were, he felt, ‘not exempted from the frailties and wants of humanity’ and were entitled to something more in the way of remuneration than their still measly salaries. Where possible salaries were increased by setting aside a small percentage of the Company’s net receipts to be divided among the relevant functionaries. Where this was not possible, particularly amongst the lower ranks of Company servants, there was a tacit understanding that as of old a man might look to his own interests.
Nevertheless Hastings’s flurry of legal reforms and commercial prohibitions did serve to curtail and contain the worst forms of extortion. If the flood of complaints scarcely abated this was in part due to the fact that there now existed channels for their expression and prospects of their redress. Given the right regulatory framework, the most rapacious of servants could be held in check and the most oppressed of peasants could take heart. Ideally Hastings would have liked to recall to Calcutta all those Englishmen who, under the guise of revenue supervisors and free merchants, were currently operating their own lucrative little cartels in the provinces. He would replace them with Indian supervisors who alone stood some chance of understanding the conflicting rights of the innumerable functionaries engaged in assessing, recording, collecting and enforcing the revenue. The directors also favoured such a recall, yet such were their individual commitments in support of their various protégés in Bengal that all Hastings was able to achieve was a clipping of the supervisors’ wings by the establishment of provincial revenue boards. That and a change of name. Henceforth the district supervisor became the district collector, or rather the District Collector.
Part administrator, part magistrate, part tax man, and part development officer, the District Collector was destined to join those many-armed gods in the Hindu pantheon and to become a feature of the Indian landscape. For those with a starry-eyed regard for the Indian Civil Service, British India begins with the D.C., and Hastings was therefore ‘wrong’ to interfere with such an office.
He was fighting against the genius of the country [writes Philip Woodruff]. The way India wants to be governed, the way she feels to be naturally right, is not by centralized rules but by personal decisions, on the platform beneath the pipal tree in the village, on the threshing floor of polished mud, on the balks between the rice fields.
Hastings might have gone along with this. His centralizing measures were designed to rein in government, not to extend it, and his objection was not to the collector as such but to his necessarily being of British birth. But even supposing Hastings lacked the I.C.S. man’s insight into India’s preferred method of government (he would surely have despised the paternalism that it implied) it must be doubtful whether he would have accorded a high priority to rural consensus when, in the aftermath of the 1770 famine, the threshing floor was choked with weeds and the rice fields rapidly reverting to jungle. The plight of the country moved Hastings and his collectors alike. From this period dates the first firm evidence of British administrators – or rather, Company servants – evincing a genuine concern for the lot of the peasant. It was somewhat ironical that at Hastings’s impeachment, Burke would seize this high moral ground to discomfit the accused and disparage his whole administration.
Hastings appeared to go even further with the novel suggestion that any government of India should enjoy the approbation of the people, a notion which furnished the later Raj with another good reason for co-opting him as a founding father. But at the time his priority was simply to restore Bengal to prosperity, thereby winning that approbation and at the same time boosting the Company’s much reduced revenue receipts. What was good for Bengal must also be good for the Company, he argued. But events proved him wrong and while the Company’s receipts did improve, the incomes of the Bengali peasantry did not. Like everyone else, Hastings had over-estimated the province’s wealth and so over-assessed the possible revenue. That Bengal had the potential for immense wealth he made no doubt; and he opined that whoever commanded it might one day acquire the dominion of all India – ‘an event which I may not mention without adding’, he added, ‘that it is what I never wish to see’.
Yet – and in this lies his real claim as architect of British India – Hastings did, reluctantly though with undeniable satisfaction, preside over events that did more to further such a d
ominion than even Clive’s adventures.
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Responding to the voluminous documentation generated by Parliament’s attempts to recall and impeach him, historians of British India have usually dwelt at length on Hastings’s supposed crimes. Happily these transgressions need scarcely detain a student of the Company. A mischievous little campaign against the Afghan Rohillas, a blatant piece of extortion in respect of Benares, some broken pledges and ferocious vendettas, a hint of bribery, a judicial murder – even if proved these transgressions were neither exceptionally heinous nor, spread over thirteen years, cumulatively damning. More and worse had been perpetrated in Bengal during each of the preceding decades.
Similarly the remorseless opposition with which Hastings had to contend – from his Council, from the Courts, from the other Presidencies and from London – was nothing new. His frustration, heightened by a naturally imperious temperament and voiced with martyred eloquence, has won him a deal of sympathy. And in so far as his opponents, most notably Philip Francis and the other Councillors wished on him by the Regulating Act, enjoyed Parliamentary sanction, his authority was distinctly more vulnerable than had been that of, say, Clive. On the other hand the knowledge that Sulivan and an influential section of opinion in India House were sympathetic to his plight encouraged a volubility of complaint and defiance not heard since William Hedges had chafed at the opposition of the cantankerous Charnock. That Presidents/Governors were still invariably opposed and often outvoted by their Councils is well illustrated by contemporary events at Madras. There, like Hastings, one governor fought a duel while another was deposed by his Council. The latter was Pigot, governor of Madras during the Seven Years War, and now back with an unpopular mandate that led not only to his deposition but to his arrest and death. Hastings, who had managed to reverse his own Council’s attempt at superseding him, showed no sympathy for the unfortunate Pigot and in fact supported his opponents.
