The three years of unbridled and systematic economic exploitation that followed the battle at Plassey proved mortal for the Bengal state. Its economy was in the hands of the Company and its servants; the nawab’s authority was circumscribed by a British resident; and Company sepoys garrisoned his cities. Mir Jafar’s impotence was demonstrated early in 1759, when Bengal was threatened by what turned out to be a halfhearted incursion by a Mughal army commanded by the emperor’s eldest son, the future Shah Alam II. Brushing aside Mir Jafar’s suggestion of buying him off, Clive led a force to Patna where he discovered that the young prince’s unpaid army had dispersed. Clive used this bloodless victory as the excuse to squeeze an annuity of £27,000 a year from the nawab. Disdainful of the profits from trade being made by his more unscrupulous colleagues, he had been angling for an award of this kind for six months.26 The sum was to be paid from the revenues of parganas close to Calcutta, which Mir had previously allocated to the Company.
By rewarding Clive with a jagir rather than the usual cash gift, Mir Jafar revealed the parlous state of his treasury. It had been drained by the Plassey pay-off and customs revenues were dwindling. Solvency, and with it a semblance of sovereignty, could only be secured by stemming the haemorrhage of Bengal’s wealth. In what turned out to be the first round in a struggle to regain independence, Mir Jafar demanded some curtailment of the commercial activities of the Company’s servants in 1760. Governor Vansittart refused to tolerate any challenge to the sacred right of the Company and its employees to trade as they wished, even though he was well aware of the abuses they committed. Clive’s puppet had, in the governor’s words, revealed himself as unfit to govern, being ‘of a Temper extremely tyrannical and avaricious at the same time very indolent and the People about him being either abject Slaves and flatterers, or else the basest Instruments of his Views’.27 Siraj-ud Daula had been vilified in almost exactly the same terms, and like him, Mir Jafar was deposed by the Company, this time without a fight. His successor, his son-in-law Mir Kasim, was described by one official as a ‘very enterprizing man of great abilities’, which may be interpreted as a tractable prince willing to do whatever he was told.28 Like the old, the new nawab was obliged to pay the power-brokers’ fees; Vansittart and a knot of councillors were believed to have pocketed at least £200,000.29 The Company’s reward for supporting Mir Kasim were the districts of Burdwan, Chittagong and Midnapur.
Mir Kasim fell short of his patrons’ expectations. During the next three years, he prepared to reverse the verdict of Plassey and restore Bengali independence. He sorted out his finances and rebuilt his army, which he equipped with modern cannon and stiffened with 200 European mercenaries, mostly artillerymen. Mir Kasim also shifted his capital away from Murshidabad to Munger, where his activities were monitored by the hircarras (spies) supervised by Henry Lushington in Patna. During the first half of 1762 they reported, among other things, that the nawab was spending large sums on hiring Ruhela cavalry, had banned his subjects from dealing with British gumastahs and was waiting for news from Europe on the outcome of the war with France.30 His open hostility and preparations for war did not create undue alarm; rather there was complacency in Calcutta, where one official observed that the Company would depose thirty nawabs if it needed to and could profit by it.31
The war opened in June 1763 with an underhand trick which went awry. While the Company was negotiating with Mir Kasim, officials in Patna undertook a pre-emptive coup de main against the city. What was easily gained was easily lost, thanks in large part to slackness and the unexpected difficulties of street fighting. The Patna garrison was evicted and its remnants were pursued across country with heavy losses. News of this reverse demoralised sepoys serving in the forces under Majors Thomas Adams and John Carnac, who were advancing on Murshidabad.32
What Carnac called ‘this truly just and necessary war’ had to be won quickly and decisively in order to repair the damage inflicted on the Company’s prestige. He was an aggressive, confident officer with sufficient experience of Indian warfare to appreciate that silver counted as much as steel on the battlefield. As he approached Burdwan, he requested Vansittart’s permission to confiscate its ‘collections’ (tax revenues) and use the cash to entice unpaid soldiers away from the local raja’s army.33 For their part, his adversaries identified lines of communications as a weakness in an army whose commanders insisted that their men did not live off the land. Raids were therefore made against Carnac’s supply columns which, on occasions, had to fight their way through.
Carnac’s and Adams’s brigades also had to endure cross-country marches in the hot season, often through flooded paddy fields. The enemy made a better showing than at Plassey, and after the engagement at Sooti on 2 August an astonished Carnac reported the ‘most obstinate resistance infinitely above whatever was made by a black army before’. At one stage, Afghan cavalry penetrated behind British lines and it was only the ‘coolness and intrepidity’ of Adams, who rallied the wavering 84th Regiment, that staved off disaster. Adams was a commander in the Clive mould, careless of his personal safety and indifferent to odds, whose nerve was vital in a crisis. ‘Good God! How much depends on the life of one man,’ Carnac wrote after one of Adams’s displays of audacity and coolheadedness.34 The strain proved too much and Adams died from the effects of his exhaustion on his way back to England to recuperate. Such men were desperately needed as the army pushed on towards Munger and Patna, and both officers and men became weary and disheartened.
Patna was retaken by a night attack and Mir Kasim, having lost the initiative, fell back threatening to kill the prisoners taken during the retreat from Patna if the Company’s forces engaged him. He kept his word and the hostages were murdered in October, despite a warning from Adams that this act of savagery would assure his own destruction. In the new year, Mir Kasim’s fortunes seemingly revived when he was reinforced by soldiers of his allies, Shuja-ud Daula, the Nawab of Awadh, and the Emperor Shah Alam II. Lukewarm partners, the two princes’ troops enabled Mir Kasim to field an army of about 40,000, strong in Afghan cavalry and with modern cannon manned by European gunners; Carnac had been dismayed to find that captured guns had screw elevators of the most up-to-date kind which enabled them to be aimed more accurately than those deployed at Plassey.35
In spite of these hurried innovations, the army of Mir Kasim and his allies was heavily defeated by a much smaller one commanded by Major Hector Munro at Buxar on 23 October 1764. It was very much a classic engagement of a kind which would occur across India during the next hundred years. On each occasion the ingredients of the Company’s victories were the same: iron discipline; the steadiness of its men, both Indian and European, in defence; and their ferocity when the moment came for a counter-attack with bayonet. Unflinching soldiers firing carefully timed volleys shattered cavalry charges at Buxar and broke the attackers’ nerve. One described the line of sepoy infantry as a ‘wall which vomited fire and flame’.36
V
The consequences of Buxar were as far-reaching as at Plassey. It marked the final disintegration of the Bengal state, brought Awadh firmly into the Company’s orbit and was an additional blow to the standing of the Mughal dynasty, which was still reeling from the Afghan invasion of three years before. A power vacuum had been created which only the Company was rich and strong enough to fill. The political settlement was masterminded by Clive, who had returned to Calcutta as governor in May 1765 with instructions from the directors to stamp out corruption and devise an orderly system of government.
Buxar made possible the last, for it gave him the opportunity to forgo what had proved to be the highly unsatisfactory procedure of picking a suitable nawab and then hoping that he would do as he was told. Clive was now able to deal directly with the emperor and secure his formal approval for a legally impeccable settlement which gave the Company absolute authority throughout Bengal. There was no question of Shah Alam II refusing; the emperor was a fugitive with an empty purse and therefore pleased to accept Cl
ive’s offer of an annual tribute of £272,000 from the revenues of Bengal and also those of Allahabad and Korah, which lay inside Awadh. In return for solvency and security (Company soldiers were stationed close by his palace at Allahabad), Shah Alam II granted the Company the diwan of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa in perpetuity, giving it the sole right to collect taxation estimated to be worth approximately £33 million a year. Clive also secured the imperial imprimatur for his personal jagir (annuity) and concessions for the Company’s ally, the Nawab of Karnataka.
There was still a nawab of Bengal, the sixteen-year-old Najm-ud Daula, whom the Company had installed as ruler with the by-now ritual distribution of bribes and presents to British officials. Henceforward, he and his successors would be ornamental ciphers whose trappings of state were paid for by Company pensions. Real power, that which came from free access to the taxes of Bengal and the day-to-day governance of the province, was in the hands of the Company.
Looking back on these events nearly twenty years later, a Company official reminded the government that ‘we acquired our Influence and Possessions by force, it is by force we must maintain them’.37 It was a phrase which would be repeated in various forms until the last days of the Raj, and it contained much truth. It became an article of faith for generations of British officers of all ranks, who believed unquestioningly that armed force alone had been the foundation of the Raj and remained the guarantee of its survival in the face of external and internal threats. This assumption was more than an interpretation of history; it was the basis of a powerful claim by military men for their views to have paramountcy whenever questions of security were under consideration.
It would be impossible to discount the value of the victories in Bengal. What might be called the stand-off at Plassey and the pitched battles of 1763–64 delivered the province into British hands and prepared the way for the political and economic penetration of Awadh. Quite simply, the Company’s army was better-trained, more inspiringly commanded and technically better equipped than its adversaries. Elsewhere, its achievements were equally impressive; despite some early hitches it overcame the French and their allies in southern India. Pondicherry fell in 1761 and four years later the new French governor, Jean Law, wrote despairingly: ‘The city was like another Jerusalem, razed to the ground, its walls overthrown, its houses destroyed and its inhabitants led to captivity.’38
Unlike the Jews, the French never recovered from their Babylonian captivity. In 1764 the Compagnie’s debts totalled £12.2 million and were increasing by the year as its trading losses rose. It was now just a commercial concern, for, by the terms of the Treaty of Paris signed in February 1763, the Compagnie had been allowed to keep all its former trading stations. But it was forbidden to indulge in politics, and to make sure it did not, its bases were to be unfortified and their garrisons severely limited. In 1776 Pondicherry was guarded by just over 200 white soldiers and 32 sepoys, a detachment equal to that which might have been stationed in some Company outpost in up-country Awadh. Although Clive still feared a recrudescence of French influence in India, possibly backed by a fleet sent from France, the Compagnie had been all but destroyed both as a political power and an economic force.
What is perhaps most striking about the events in India between 1756 and 1765 was their pace and decisiveness. In less than a decade two formidable powers, the Compagnie des Indes and the state of Bengal, were knocked out of the political ring. Awadh had begun an irreversible slide into British control and a Mughal emperor had been driven to go begging to the Company for money and protection. The catalysts for these astonishing reversals of fortune had been a small band of what might be called private-enterprise imperialists, who had found themselves in a position to shape Company policy as they proceeded and were more or less free of any restraint from above.
They had followed no pre-conceived plan, nor did any one of them justify himself with a vision of imperial destiny or mission. They were pragmatic, flexible men who reacted to events as they happened. Most significantly, Clive and those who followed his example were quite willing to adopt that moral elasticity vital to political success in India. All regarded themselves as patriots and were so, save that their sense of duty to their country was always tempered by what they would have considered enlightened selfishness. Private and public advantage proceeded hand in hand. Vansittart proclaimed that the Company’s interests were automatically those of Britain and it followed, at least by his logic, that by advancing them alongside his own, he was doing a favour for his countrymen.39 Clive thought along similar lines, arguing that his and his colleagues’ endeavours had created a new and extremely valuable national asset. In 1770 he reminded the Prime Minister, Lord North, of the considerable ‘annual advantages’ that now flowed into Britain from the rise in income from customs duties on Indian imports. The nation as a whole was benefitting from an injection of capital in the form of private fortunes, such as his own, and he warned that if these gains were somehow lost, there would be widespread ‘Accusation and Resentment’.40
Britain’s new possessions in India were indeed generating plenty of accusations and resentments, but not the kind Clive had in mind. His countrymen were becoming disturbed by the often distressing details of how exactly this empire had been obtained, and were growing uneasy about how its possessions might undermine or corrupt what was called ‘the national character’.
4
An Empire Within an
Empire: British
Reactions to Indian
Conquests
I
Samuel Foote had a jobbing playwright’s knack of knowing what his audiences wanted. The bon ton of the early 1770s was obsessed by ‘nabobs’: the word was a corruption of nawab and was used to describe anyone who had come home from India with a fortune. Nabobs were arrivistes whose efforts to thrust themselves into fashionable society and politics were a source of amusement and indignation. Foote detected a market and responded to it with a comedy, The Nabob, which was first performed in Dublin’s Theatre Royal in November 1773. It was topical, rollicking stuff and enjoyed considerable success.
The nabob of the title is Sir Matthew Mite, a brash vulgarian. Theatregoers would have immediately recognised features of Clive in his character and behaviour; he had been a scapegrace schoolboy whose misdeeds included throwing a barrow woman into the Fleet ditch and throwing a firework at a Methodist preacher, a prank for which he got someone else to take the blame.1 The scoundrel flourishes in India and, at the start of the play, we hear:
Sir Matthew Mite, from the Indies, came thundering amongst us; and, profusely scattering the spoils of ruined provinces, corrupted virtue and alienated the affections of all the old friends to the family.
Mite has two ambitions: first to win acceptance in elegant society, and secondly to purchase that ultimate token of social success, a seat in the Commons. His endeavours to assume the standing of a gentleman are ludicrous. A waiter teaches him to cast dice in the modish manner and instructs him in the ‘oathes and phrases that are most in use at the club’. He also wishes to cut a figure with men of learning and has been gulled into buying bogus antiques, which he intends to deposit in a national collection. They include: Falstaff’s corkscrew, Henry VIII’s nutcrackers and the toecap of the slipper worn by Cardinal Pandulf when he kicked King John. This Gothic junk impresses the ignoramuses of the Society of Antiquaries, who elect him a fellow, and Mite returns the honour with a donation of more curios, including a green chamber pot, allegedly the sarcophagus of Mark Antony’s coachman.
There is a sinister side to Mite. He once confesses, ‘I have thoughts of founding in this town a seraglio,’ and adds that his odalisques will be guarded by ‘three blacks from Bengal’. He is warned against this scheme and pointedly reminded that imprisoning women was unthinkable and illegal ‘in a country of freedom’.2 Here is the central theme of the comedy: Mite has been seduced by the morals of India, a none-too-difficult process, given his character, and has returned determined to corru
pt his fellow countrymen.
Mite’s attempts to subvert common British decency provide the plot of the play. His plans to enter Parliament involve a challenge to Sir John Oldham, the impoverished but honourable head of an ancient family. At every turn, Mite behaves in an underhand manner. He has secretly taken over Oldham’s debts, which he promises to repay in return for the borough which he controls. He adds, impudently, that he will settle a ‘jaghire’ on Oldham; pay for the shipping of his two daughters to Calcutta ‘and there procure them suitable husbands’; and provide junior Company posts for their brothers. Faced with this bargain, Oldham’s brother-in-law complains, ‘No wonder that so much contrivance and cunning has been an overmatch for a plain English gentleman, or an innocent Indian one.’ Lady Oldham concurs: ‘With the wealth of the East, we have too imported the worst of its vices.’
In the end Mite is frustrated through the intervention of Oldham’s brother, a merchant whose code of honour has not been contaminated by trade. He tells Mite that ‘corrupt as you may conceive this country to be, there are superior spirits living, who would disdain an alliance with grandeur obtained at the expense of honour or virtue.’ Lady Oldham warns that: ‘The possessions arising from plunder very rarely are permanent; we every day see what has been treacherously and rapaciously gained, as profusely and full as rapidly squandered.’ Mite is genuinely puzzled by the absence of any ‘gratitude of the country to those who have given it dominion and wealth’, a complaint which was echoed by Clive, among others.
In essence, The Nabob is a tale of a knave whose moral infirmities have been made worse by his life in India. Sympathy is shown towards those Indians he has deceived, and throughout the author claims that Indian riches are tainted because they have been fraudulently acquired. Corruption is contagious, and the play strongly suggests that Mite and his kind are debauching domestic society and politics with vices endemic to India, but hitherto absent from Britain. Moreover, as The Nabob makes clear, gentlemen with pedigrees and pretensions were revolted by the entry into their world of a pack of crass nouveaux riches who not only aped their manners but could outspend them. Warren Hastings, who represented old money fallen on hard times, was keen to restore his family’s status, whatever the cost. When he purchased the manor of Daylesford in Gloucestershire, which his family had been forced to sell in 1715, he instructed his agent to ‘give as much for it as it is worth and if you give something more for it I shall not be sorry’.3
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