Quite apart from the immense plunder to be had in India, there was an established system of taxes to be milked by the Company: it was the good fortune of the British traders to be at their boldest in India when the Mughal Empire, which had dominated much of the subcontinent since the early sixteenth century, was losing its grip.* In Bengal, the wealthiest part of India, the Company had, for example, achieved more or less complete control of the export of silk and sugar, cotton and jute, salt and saltpetre by the middle of the eighteenth century. But then in 1756 the old nawab died and was succeeded by his nephew and adopted son, Siraj ud-Daula, who decided that the foreign presence was impertinent, demanded gifts from the European trading companies and, when the British refused, attacked Calcutta. There now occurred an event which would overshadow British attitudes to India for a century or more.
As Siraj ud-Daula’s massive forces advanced through the city, many of the British simply took to their heels, abandoning comrades, wives and children and fleeing to ships in the port. The Company’s fort was left in the hands of those who could not or would not flee, under the command of John Zephaniah Holwell, a Dublin-born doctor, now employed as the East India Company’s tax collector. On the afternoon of Sunday, 20 June, Holwell surrendered. The victorious nawab ordered that the English prisoners be confined in the garrison’s dungeon. This turned out to be a cell about 20 feet square, into which, Holwell subsequently claimed, 146 people were marched at the point of swords. There were two small barred windows. In addition to the heat of so many bodies crammed together, it was early in the rainy season and the night especially hot and muggy. Those at the windows offered increasingly vast sums of money to the guards outside to release them, who said they could do nothing without the nawab’s authority, and he was busy with his post-battle debauch. The temperature inside the dungeon continued to rise. One of the prisoners tried to slake his thirst by sucking the perspiration from Holwell’s shirtsleeves. The doctor attempted to drink his own urine. No one could breathe properly and the temperature climbed higher still. Some prisoners sank to the floor, others became delirious or fell into comas. As the imperial historian Thomas Babington Macaulay wrote:
Nothing in history or fiction … approaches the horrors which were recounted by the few survivors of that night … the prisoners went mad with despair. They trampled each other down, fought for the places at the windows, fought for the pittance of water with which the cruel mercy of the murderers mocked their agonies, raved, prayed, blasphemed, implored the guards to fire among them. At length the tumult died away in low gaspings and moanings.
When dawn broke and the nawab had recovered from the night before, the door was opened. Macaulay described how ‘twenty-three ghastly figures, such as their own mothers would not have known, staggered one by one out of the charnel-house. A pit was instantly dug. The dead bodies, a hundred and twenty-three in number, were flung into it promiscuously and covered up.’ The Black Hole of Calcutta was a horror story to rival anything among the Gothic tales which swept Britain in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
But Macaulay – one of that line of Highlanders who became pillars of empire (he had served on the Governor General’s Council in India) – was writing over eighty years after the event. There are various inherent improbabilities in the story (how was it physically possible to force 146 Europeans into a space so small, and if it was so gargantuan a crime, why did the East India Company not include it in its list of demands for compensation later?). Macaulay had reason enough to exaggerate the drama and Holwell, his source, sufficient incentive to obscure the embarrassment of his surrender with a story of grotesque human rights abuse. Holwell paid for a memorial to be erected at the site, but it was demolished in 1821, on the orders of the then Governor General after becoming ‘the lounging place for lower class loafers of all sorts who gossip squatting around and against it’. Exactly what happened and how many lives were lost will never be known, but the significance of the Black Hole of Calcutta lies much more in what it was held to represent as a terrible example of the fate which could await Europeans in this strange land – in 1901 the Viceroy, Lord Curzon, commissioned a replacement monument, believing that the event had laid the foundations for British India. It was now nearly a century and a half after the night in question, yet for the purposes of imperial propaganda the memorial recorded that ‘146 British inhabitants of Calcutta were confined on the night of 20th June 1756, and … only 23 came out alive.’ As the Calcutta poet Rabindranath Tagore observed many years later, it ‘proclaimed to the heavens that exaggeration is not a monopoly of any particular race or nation’.* But precise numbers were not the point. Clearly, far too many people were crammed into a horribly confined space. The symbolic warning tale of the Black Hole of Calcutta was still being taught in British schools in the 1960s.
Retribution (generally inevitable in British India) came in the form of an expedition sent up from Madras under the command of Robert Clive. It landed in Bengal in December 1756 as news arrived that hostilities had officially resumed between Britain and France, in what later became known as the Seven Years War. Clive retook Calcutta with little trouble and then decided he would finish off Siraj ud-Daula and his French backers for good. By February the intimidated nawab had agreed to pay reparations. But it was not enough. A coterie of Bengal bankers and merchants was willing to offer Clive big financial rewards for unseating the nawab and replacing him with someone more congenial. Clive’s choice was Mir Jafar, the intensely ambitious child of Arab immigrants who had risen to become one of Siraj ud-Daula’s commanders. Treachery now outdid treachery: if the financial backers thought they were dealing with an English gentleman, they did not know their man, for unknown to them Clive drew up two different versions of the agreement and forged the signature of the British admiral who was supposed to guarantee its trustworthiness.
It was 23 June 1757, a year since the Black Hole of Calcutta, and the weather was sweltering when Clive’s East India Company army closed on the nawab at Plassey. A mile away stood Siraj ud-Daula’s vast forces, perhaps 50,000 strong, along with wives, concubines, servants, traders, children and associated hangers-on. Astrologers and other crackpots were on hand to advise on tactics. Many of the infantry had been press-ganged into service and would be readied for battle with doses of opium. Characteristically, commanders would then ride into combat on elephants, presenting lovely targets for sharpshooters, while the doped-up infantry rushed forward – as one not unsympathetic observer put it, ‘both in their garb and impotent fury, resembling a mob of frantic women’. In support of this swirling mob, though, Siraj ud-Daula had forty pieces of heavy artillery, supervised by a team of French gunners.
Early in the morning, the nawab’s guns began to shell the Company troops. Clive’s plan was to wait out the bombardment and then, outnumbered twenty to one though they were, to counterattack late at night, relying on Mir Jafar to improve the odds by withdrawing his forces from the field. Suddenly, it began to pour with rain; with their gunpowder soaked, the nawab’s cannon were immediately put out of action. When Mir Jafar kept his promise, wheeling his forces off downriver, away from the fighting, the battle was as good as decided. The Company forces broke cover and chased down the nawab’s fleeing soldiers. Clive’s dispatch to the Company informed them that ‘five hundred [enemy] horses are killed and three elephants. Our loss is trifling, not above 20 Europeans killed and wounded.’ Siraj ud-Daula, who had attempted to escape ‘disguised in a mean dress … attended only by his favourite concubine … and eunuch’, was caught and put to death later.
Clive’s victory effectively doubled the size of British-controlled India, turning him into perhaps the most powerful British citizen of all time, with 40 million people living under his authority – five times the population of his home country. He had also transformed a seaborne trading enterprise into a land empire. The government in London – months away by sea – had had no say in this massive acquisition. But, whether they desired it or not, t
hey now had an empire in India.
And with it came enormous personal temptations for Clive. As Macaulay put it, ‘In the field … his habits were remarkably simple … But when he was no longer at the head of an army, he laid aside this Spartan temperance for the ostentatious luxury of a Sybarite.’ Like others who joined the Company, Clive was in India to make his fortune – the phrase ‘buccaneering capitalists’ might have been invented for them – but he was in a class of his own: inventive and bold on the battlefield, scheming and devious in business. He made political deals the way he made business deals, audaciously, promiscuously, arrogantly, and was always ready to redefine what they meant. Victory at Plassey had delivered him the cornucopia of Bengal, and Clive set an example by immediately filling his boots. Having installed Mir Jafar on the throne, he turned to the question of payment due from his puppet, the first instalment of which was sent downriver to the British fort in a convoy of seventy-five boats under naval escort, perhaps the biggest haul of booty in history. Clive used the spoils of India as a shortcut to the trappings of eminence in England – country estates, works of art, to say nothing of the seat in parliament, along with others for his father and a close friend. Soon came a peerage to mark his victory. To his disappointment, it was only an Irish one, so he changed the name of his estate in County Clare to Plassey.
But there was more to come. The survival of the nawabs depended upon their ability to enforce the payment of taxes, and the Company’s army (much of it drawn from traditional mercenary or warrior sections of Indian society and officered by men recruited in Britain) was much the most powerful force in the land. The Indian princes’ military inferiority increasingly rendered them hostage to the Company. Mir Jafar, for example, was soon utterly dependent upon British forces, and the Company could insist that he foot the bill not merely for his own security but for their investment and campaigns elsewhere.
Clive returned to India in 1765 and found the Company’s army poised for a possible advance on Delhi, the seat of the Mughal emperor. He settled instead for a treaty with the emperor by which the Mughals recognized the British as tax collectors in Bengal, Orissa and Bihar in return for being left alone. The nawab had become now little more than an ornament. (Clive, characteristically, realized that the arrangement would make the Company even more attractive to investors, and used the development for some serious insider dealing.) When Clive arrived back in England again in July 1767, his personal fortune was estimated at £400,000, an enormous sum at the time. The government festooned him with more honours, of course, installing him in the Order of the Bath and making him a lord lieutenant, but the mood was changing. Apart from snobbish resentment of the nabobs (and Clive was the biggest nabob of all) there were mounting ethical anxieties: precisely how had this great wealth been acquired when there were stories of appalling famines among ordinary Indians in which, it was reported, ‘the living were feeding on the dead’? The British upper classes could contain their distaste for new money as long as they were being cut in on any profits to be had, but when Company shares fell (long after Clive had liquidated much of his holding, of course) those who had borrowed to invest turned on him in fury. In the House of Commons, ‘Gentleman Johnny’ Burgoyne claimed that all land seized by British subjects belonged to the Crown, that Clive had certainly had no excuse for accepting massive personal payments and that the forging of Admiral Watson’s signature was outrageous. India was the worst example of oppression in history. ‘We have had in India revolution upon revolution,’ he declared, ‘extortion upon extortion.’ But Clive was insouciant. Called to explain himself he remarked that ‘an opulent city lay at my mercy; its richest bankers bid against each other for my smiles; I walked through vaults which were thrown open to me alone, piled on either hand with gold and jewels … Mr Chairman,’ he sighed, ‘at this moment I stand astonished at my own moderation.’
In November 1774 Baron Clive of Plassey – now aged forty-nine – was playing cards with friends at his house in Berkeley Square when he left the table and did not return. His health had been bad for some time; what had seemed an especially unshakeable cold refused to go away and instead became so bad that he was able to relieve the discomfort only with the use of opium – a habit he had acquired in India. Perhaps the drug killed him – it seems to fit the spirit of post-imperial times to believe in some sort of just deserts, although rumours at the time said he left the room to stick a penknife into his throat. They buried him in the little redbrick church at Moreton Say in Shropshire, beneath a plaque inscribed with the words ‘Primus in Indis’. Disgusted by England’s readiness to genuflect before wealth and power, the radical Thomas Paine danced on his grave. ‘Lord Clive is himself a treatise upon vanity, printed in a golden type. The most unlettered clown writes explanatory notes thereon, and reads them to his children.’
The parliamentary investigations into Clive’s behaviour in India of course exonerated him. He had appealed to MPs’ fellow-feeling with the words ‘leave me my honour, take away my fortune’. They certainly left him the latter. His role in establishing British rule in India can hardly be exaggerated. Had he not taken ship, perhaps someone else of similar avarice and equally steady nerve – of one nationality or another – would have emerged in his place. But it was Clive who was there, Clive who gave the Company its commanding presence and Clive whose reputation lives with the shame of events like the famine his administrative system exacerbated.
The sheer scale of the East India Company’s operations meant it was now impossible for the pretence to be maintained that it was a mere trading enterprise. In 1773 British parliamentary legislation decreed that a governor general for Bengal, to be advised by a Council, should be appointed by the British government. The first man to hold the post was Warren Hastings, an earnest, slightly shy and comparatively sophisticated son of an impoverished Cotswold clergyman. From an early age he yearned to recover the family estate at Daylesford, and everyone knew that if you wanted to make a lot of money quickly, the best thing to do was to join the East India Company. Clive was a trader turned warrior. Hastings was a trader turned bureaucrat. Appointed to extinguish corruption and reform the administration of justice in Calcutta at the same time as sorting out the Company finances, he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. For on his watch the two most powerful forces of empire, trade and morality, collided. Hastings sailed for home in 1785, expecting the thanks of an appreciative nation. ‘I have saved India, in spite of them all, from foreign conquest,’ he wrote. ‘[I have] become the instrument of raising the British name.’ He had reckoned without the deadly fusion of jealousy and probity.
One of the men appointed to serve on the Council concocted by the British government to advise Hastings had been Philip Francis. The two men came to loathe each other. After serving six years in India, during which time he made a small fortune at the card table, was dragged through the courts for seducing another man’s wife and fought a duel with Hastings (which both men survived), Francis returned to England in 1781, where he bought himself a seat in parliament and began doing his utmost to destroy Hastings. His accusations – of venality, unnecessary violence and wholesale corruption – did not get far at first, for Francis was widely considered an India bore. But when he fed his information to the great parliamentary orator Edmund Burke he acquired the most powerful of allies. Burke’s often contradictory opinions cannot be reduced to coherence other than by seeing them through the prism of his unique high-mindedness. In contrast to the chancers of the Company, whose interest was mere pillage, what was being done in his country’s name and by his country’s citizens mattered intensely to Burke. It was not that he felt there was anything uniquely evil about the young men who took ship to India: they were no ‘worse than the boys whom we are whipping at school, or that we see trailing a pike, or bending over a desk at home’. The problem was that they rolled into India in wave after wave ‘with appetites continually renewing for a food that is continually wasting’. The British relationship with Indi
a was thus entirely one of serial plundering and the visitors brought neither art nor education nor even kindness to the people. ‘Were we to be driven out of India this day,’ he wrote, ‘nothing would remain, to tell that it had been possessed, during the inglorious period of our dominion, by anything better than the orangutan or the tiger.’ Francis’s evidence seemed to offer Burke the chance to confront the Company. Parliament and the nation were already in one of Britain’s periodic fits of morality when, in February 1788, he rose to impeach Warren Hastings.
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