The princes did not want to be absorbed into a nationalistic India or Pakistan, but their pleas were ignored, the British voided their treaty obligations to the states and left them to the sufferance of India and Pakistan, which had far less toleration for princely sovereignty than the British had. As the princely states were partitioned so was the Indian Army, to which so many British officers had devoted their lives and careers. One such, Field Marshal Sir Claude Auchinleck, commander in chief of the Indian army, was given the melancholy task of severing the institution he loved along the ethnic and religious lines that would soon demark India and Pakistan.
Winston Churchill had warned that an independent India would degenerate into communal carnage; he was right. Hardened British officers, used to the slaughter of war, found themselves unable to stomach the sadistic mutilations and mass murders that followed independence and partition—with Sikh, Muslim, and Hindu each trying to outdo the other in preying upon refugees, desecrating women, slitting babies from their mothers’ wombs, and killing or mutilating upwards of a million people. The Pax Britannica was no more, and not even Gandhi survived the chaos he helped unleash; he was assassinated by a Hindu nationalist.
The India of the British Raj was a glorious thing, uniting a subcontinent under a benign, tolerant, and liberal administration that strove to improve the lot of the people it served, providing justice, and ruling with a light hand and through local rulers wherever possible, showing the mailed fist only to keep the peace, and with an army drawn from the subcontinent’s own “martial races.” From its ashes at least something has been saved—Britain’s democratic principles; English language and literature, and the idea of a free and popular press; the shared games and food; and a nostalgic affection in many circles, including Indian ones, for what once was.
Films about British India That Anti-Colonialists Don’t Want You to See
The Lives of a Bengal Lancer, 1935, with Gary Cooper and Franchot Tone. Good evocation of what life could be like for a young British officer in India.
The Charge of the Light Brigade, 1936, with Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland. The history’s a little off—the Cawnpore massacre, accurately enough depicted, is misappropriated as a precursor to the Crimean War—but enjoyable nonetheless.
The Drum (also known as Drums), 1938, with Sabu and Roger Livesey. Filmed in India, an adventure spectacular set in the early twentieth century.
Gunga Din, 1939, with Cary Grant, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., and Victor McLaglen. The great Indian adventure film; Rudyard Kipling (an actor portraying him, that is) makes a guest appearance.
Northwest Frontier (also known as Flame over India), 1959, with Kenneth Moore and Lauren Bacall. A nifty little thriller that nicely captures how a well-meaning British officer might do his duty in terrific style, and yet earn “the blame of those ye better / The hate of those ye guard.”
The Man Who Would Be King, 1975, with Sean Connery and Michael Caine. Based on the Rudyard Kipling short story. Two British soldiers decide to set up a kingdom of their own.
Chapter 12
ROBERT CLIVE, 1ST BARON CLIVE (1725–1774)
“Our island, so fertile in heroes and statesmen, has scarcely ever produced a man more truly great. . . .”
—Lord Macaulay on Robert Clive1
Robert Clive—Clive of India, a man who would conquer a subcontinent for the British Empire (and also predict the Americans would create an empire of their own rather than stay loyal to Britain)—was a boy who loved fighting. His uncle tried to cure him of it, saying that “I do what I can to suppress the hero,”2 but as time would prove, the hero would win out. Clive led a gang of young hooligans who threatened shopkeepers in a year-round version of trick or treat; in this case: pay up or we smash your windows.
He was not lowly born, but rather came from the respectable middle class (his father was a middling country squire turned London lawyer and a member of Parliament). Clive wasn’t much of a student, however, and his youthful high spirits eventually congealed into a dour visage. He seemed a young man without bright prospects until his father introduced him to a director of the East India Company, with whom he signed on as a clerk. The job was in Madras, India.
* * *
Did you know?
Clive learned Portuguese while stranded in Brazil on his first trip to India, but never learned an Indian language, despite leading Indian armies into battle, creating the British Empire in India, and serving as India’s governor-general
At the Battle of Plassey, Clive with 3,000 men defeated an army of more than 50,000
His death remains a mystery
* * *
The passage took him through storms and bad seamanship, the loss of many of his belongings, and an unexpected nine-month idyll in Brazil where he taught himself a smattering of Portuguese. Though he would later lead sepoys into battle, Clive never bothered to learn any of the native languages of the subcontinent. But Portuguese was useful with the traders in India, and perhaps it was useful with the young ladies of Brazil. From there he sailed to South Africa and then to Madras where, in June 1744, he was confronted by the heat, smells, and jostling humanity of India. He was not happy. He was lonely, and that little corner of England which was the East India Company’s Fort St. George left him feeling stifled. He whiled away his spare hours drinking, and, more important, reading. The unstudious ruffian became an autodidact. His repressed energies yearned for an outlet greater than acting as a clerk for the company. He soon found one—and if he had not he might very well have killed himself. He confided to a friend that he had put a pistol to his head and twice pulled the trigger with no result, convincing him that destiny had something in store for him. That thing was war.
From Clerk to Hero
In 1746, in a spillover from the Austrian War of Succession, the French seized Madras. Clive was imprisoned—but not well guarded. Disguised as Indians, he and three of his colleagues escaped to the nearest English settlement (though it was fifty miles away), Fort St. David. Burning with a young man’s desire for revenge, he enlisted in the Company’s army. In terms of prestige, this was a catastrophic plunge from being a clerk, but it suited both the circumstances and his temperament. Clive was meant to be a soldier—indeed he so distinguished himself in the defense of Fort St. David that he was commissioned an ensign.
His courage extended beyond the battlefield. At a game of cards he accused an officer of cheating. This led to a duel. Clive, with the first shot, missed. The officer told Clive that if he retracted his accusation, he would not fire. Clive responded, “Fire and be damned. I said you cheated, I say so still and I will never repay you.”3 The flabbergasted officer lowered his pistol and that was the end of it—proving if nothing else that Clive had a remarkable facility for avoiding bullets; a talent that is essential for any hero. He dodged them in action after the siege of St. David and showed an equal facility for ducking and weaving his way through slashing sabres while campaigning on behalf of the rajah of Tanjore. He was hot-headed and used his cane to strike men who questioned his courage or the courage of the Company’s troops.
Clive, now a lieutenant, would gladly have continued his military career, but the Company was more interested in profits than military glory and conquest (though these kept coming) and took a heavy scalpel to the defense budget. Clive returned to civilian employment but at a much higher level and with the goal of making his fortune. He was a rising young man.
He had a French counterpart, twenty-eight years his senior, haughty, clever, quite brilliant, scheming, and ambitious—Joseph Francois Dupleix, the governor-general of French India who aimed to have India entire by alliances with Indian princes. The British, watching French influence sweep southern India, drew a line in the sands of the Carnatic (southeastern India), backing a rival nawab. The result was a jolly, reputation-making war for Clive.
But it didn’t start in a very jolly way. Clive was relegated to supplying the army rather than leading a portion of it. That wouldn’t stand�
�especially as the Company’s initial efforts to support its rival nawab, Muhammad Ali, were feeble and embarrassing in the extreme. Clive demanded the rank of captain and said he would serve without pay. It was an offer that no businessman—and the East India Company was a business after all—could refuse. Duly commissioned, he took the field and soon slipped through enemy lines to the besieged city of Trichinopoly where Ali’s forces were outnumbered ten to one (20,000 against 2,000), and 60 Britons stood against 800 French.
Ali and Clive contrived a scheme to break the siege by hitting the nawab Chanda Sahib at Arcot, the capital of the Carnatic. The twenty-six-year-old Clive, raising troops at Fort St. David and Fort St. George, marched from Madras with an army of 200 Europeans and perhaps 300 to 500 sepoys. They were a ragamuffin bunch; their eight officers were men like Clive—civilians turned soldiers; only two or three had seen action. Clive set his men a terrific pace, for he hoped to surprise the Arcot garrison. He didn’t do that, but his forced march through drenching thunderstorms convinced the nawab’s army to flee. Clive’s troops, they thought, must be supermen; Clive entered Arcot as a liberator.
Clive worked to stay on the good side of the city’s inhabitants, but he and his men knew better than to trust to the goodwill of Arcot’s people; they would surely turn from friend to foe if interest so dictated. The city appeared indefensible given the number of men he had, and it surely housed thousands of Chanda Sahib loyalists who might turn their hands to murder or insurrection. Still, Clive was resolved to hold it. He harried Chanda Sahib’s men camped outside Arcot and did what he could to better supply and defend the city’s fort. His manpower resources were dwindling, as he had to send troops back for the possible defense of Madras. He had no more than 320 effectives to hold the city.
On 23 September, an army of at least 10,000 men attacked Arcot, quickly breaching the crumbling city walls. Clive and his men held the fort in the city center; and while the enemy expected him to be cowed, Clive led his troopers charging to seize the enemy’s big French guns. They failed but again stunned Chanda Sahib’s men with their audacity. A lieutenant stopped a sniper’s bullet meant for Clive, and as the siege progressed, snipers riddled the parapets, slotting Clive’s men but never striking home on Clive himself.
Heavy French artillery repeatedly reduced the walls to rubble; and just as repeatedly Clive’s men shored them up. The besiegers had swelled to 15,000 men and planned to make their final attack on a Shia Muslim holy day. The vast, frenzied army came charging before dawn on 14 November, with giant iron-helmeted elephants ready to batter the walls. Clive directed musket fire that acted as mice among the pachyderms, scattering the elephants, and kept up waves of volleys that broke up Chanda Sahib’s attacks. Frustrated, the enemy tried to reduce Arcot by bombarding it. The crash and rattle of artillery continued until two in the morning. When dawn arose, Clive’s men stiffened for the next attack, but saw the field was deserted. Chanda Sahib’s officers knew a British relief force and hostile Mahratta mercenaries were on their way.4 Clive had held the city for two and a half months, and withstood the full power of the besieging enemy for more than seven weeks. It was like the Battle of the Alamo (which of course had not yet happened)—except the defenders won.
The indefatigable Clive now took an army, including the Mahrattas, and harassed the retreating enemy. Always outnumbered, he nevertheless defeated Chanda Sahib’s forces repeatedly, building a reputation as an invincible commander, and convincing Indian princes that it was better to be for Clive than against him. Muhammad Ali, still besieged at Trichinopoly, had seen his forces grow to 40,000 men in the wake of Clive’s victories—they now outnumbered their besiegers. But no commander had stepped forward to attack the enemy. Clive arrived and changed all that, breaking the siege in April 1752, then penning Chanda Sahib’s remaining troops on the island of Srirangam and compelling them to surrender in early June. Chanda Sahib was beheaded by his Indian enemies, and Britain’s ally Muhammad Ali became nawab of the Carnatic.
The Prize of Plassey
Clive returned to civilian life and found himself a wealthy man; his earnings as a company steward and commissary officer had stacked up while he was in the field. Celebrated for courage and martial genius, and now with a fortune as well, he nevertheless did not settle down immediately. Indeed, he took a commission to fight the French again, which he did with his usual cool head and reckless courage, spurring on his green troops by constantly exposing himself to the enemy’s fire—which continued to miss him.5 He returned victorious once more, married in February 1753, and embarked for England where he won election to Parliament at the age of twenty-eight.
The victory, however, was short-lived. Clive’s election was affirmed by a Parliamentary committee as free from irregularities, but the prime minister, the Duke of Newcastle, and the opposition Tories voted against the committee and denied Clive his seat. Their common interest was keeping Clive’s patron, James Fox, from becoming first minister of the Crown. Clive’s political ambitions thwarted, his fortune dwindling faster than he expected, he accepted the Company’s offer to return to India.
Nominally, Clive was deputy governor of Madras; more important, he was a lieutenant-colonel of the Company’s armed forces. His goal was to absorb all of French India. His first adventure was reducing a pirate stronghold at Gheria.
In 1756, Clive was appointed commander of Fort St. David—it was here that he learned that Calcutta had been attacked by the despicable nawab of Bengal, whose lethal imprisonment of nearly a hundred and fifty Britons in the “Black Hole of Calcutta” was an outrage that had to be avenged—and Clive, naturally, was the man selected to do the avenging. He did so with his usual efficiency. In the words of Macaulay, “Nine hundred English infantry, fine troops and full of spirit, and fifteen hundred sepoys, composed the army which sailed to punish a Prince who had more subjects than Louis the Fifteenth.”6 Macaulay gave a generous estimate of British strength; the troops available to Clive were cut by more than a third when some of the ships carrying them had to turn back in stormy seas. Nevertheless, Calcutta was abandoned at his approach—as was discovered when a drunken British sailor wandered out of camp and decided to breach the city walls. He chased off a handful of Muslim soldiers and declared, “The place is mine!”
But delivering Calcutta from the notorious Nawab Siraj-ad-daula was not enough to restore British prestige and preserve the company’s position. Clive saw that what was required—and what was possible—was the annexation of Bengal; and it was to that task that he set himself. The first step was the destruction of the nawab’s army, which was achieved at the Battle of Plassey (23 June 1757) where Clive and 3,000 men routed the more than 50,000 troops of the nawab.
Nearly 1,000 Englishmen against more than 55,000 soldiers of the nawab of Bengal = advantage England
“Forty thousand infantry, armed with firelocks, pikes, swords, bows and arrows, covered the plain. They were accompanied by fifty pieces of ordnance of the largest size, each tugged by a long team of white oxen, and each pushed on from behind by an elephant. Some smaller guns, under the direction of a few French auxiliaries, were perhaps more formidable. The cavalry were fifteen thousand, drawn not from the effeminate population of Bengal, but from the bolder race which inhabits the northern provinces; and the practiced eye of Clive could perceive that both the men and the horses were more powerful than those of the Carnatic. The force which he had to oppose to this great multitude consisted of only three thousand men. But of these nearly a thousand were English; and all were led by English officers, and trained in the English discipline.”
Lord Macaulay on the Battle of Plassey, Essay on Clive (Longmans’ English Classics, Longmans, Green and Co., 1928), p. 52
The campaign continued as France, providentially, was at war with England and had allied itself with the nawab, which gave Clive every pretext he needed to fight both. The Company’s navy took the lead against the French Bengalese city of Chandernagore, which Clive besieged from the landward
side. It fell to the British on 23 March 1757.
But it was not purely force of arms that defeated the nawab; Clive also engaged in a diplomatic conspiracy, supporting a coup against the nawab and deceiving a greedy, two-faced wealthy Bengali merchant who had tried to play both sides and threatened to reveal the plot unless he was given five percent of the nawab’s treasury. With an entirely clear conscience, Clive went to the extent of drawing up a fake treaty and forging a signature on it to fool the merchant. The coup was successful, and the merchant, when he discovered that his dreams of avarice had been foiled, lost his mind and become a pathetic simpleton (at least according to Lord Macaulay). Some of Clive’s biographers (like Macaulay) condemn Clive for his diplomatic duplicity, accusing him, in essence, of going native rather than upholding British standards—and indeed, years later Clive would face parliamentary questions over his conduct; there was always strong suspicion in Parliament against nabobs, whom it was assumed had cut corners to achieve their riches. Of course, Clive has had his defenders, both at the time and later among some of his biographers (like Robert Harvey). Clive did not interfere when the former nawab was put to death, and he accepted a fortune as a gift from the new nawab—and while this too has come under scrutiny, Clive could have demanded much more; as an employee of the British East India Company there were no bars to his seeking profit from princes. The company, meanwhile, made him governor of Bengal, a country of 40 million people.
The Politically Incorrect Guide to the British Empire Page 15
