Raj
Page 7
There was little in The Nabob which would have shocked audiences. During 1772 and the first half of 1773, Parliamentary investigations were uncovering the methods by which the nabobs had made their fortunes. The country heard details of chicanery, double-dealing and extortion, which gave an added edge to blue-blooded jealousy. These revelations contributed to a widespread apprehension that a novel and unwholesome source of political power was on the rampage.
Snobbery and fears about the moral and political pollution of the nation combined in Horace Walpole’s frequent outbursts against nabobs. In July 1773 he wrote:
What is England now? – A sink of Indian wealth, filled by nabobs and emptied by Macaronis! A senate sold and despised! A country overrun by horse-races! A gaming, robbing, wrangling, railing nation without principles, genius, character or allies.
He damned all nabobs as the spawn of Macheath, the highwayman antihero of The Beggars’ Opera, and once asserted that the arch-nabob Clive was the begetter of all Macaronis, Italianate fops who, it was whispered, indulged the ‘Italian vice’, as sodomy was then called.4 Walpole was the son of an earl and a dilettante who preferred an idealised Gothic past to what he considered to be a degenerate present, which partly explains the ferocity of his outbursts.
There were two complementary issues at stake. The first was the possibly harmful impact of the nabobs on British political life, and the second concerned how far the British people were prepared to tolerate a despotism being exercised in their name in India. There had never been any objection in principle to nabobs buying Parliamentary seats in an age which accepted that wealth and political influence were synonymous. What upset contemporaries were the methods employed by nabobs seeking election. Like the fictional Sir Matthew Mite, they were men in a hurry and unconcerned with common political courtesies. They never bothered to cultivate constituencies and were indifferent to the feelings of those they had swept aside. It appeared, particularly to their victims, that the nabobs were behaving in Britain as they had in India. Furthermore, they were able to offer more than the going rate, either in bribes to voters or payments to the owners of rotten boroughs. The nabobs were making politics more expensive and this, above all, made them enemies among a political establishment whose wealth came from the ownership of land.
By 1767, Clive, his cousin George (who had made £20,000 during the Plassey campaign), his friend John Walsh and two ex-governors of Madras had secured seats in the Commons.5 Thereafter, the numbers of nabob MPs rose steadily; there were twenty-six between 1774 and 1780 and forty-five between 1784 and 1790, an increase which reflected the fact that during this period ultimate power over Indian affairs had passed from the Company to Parliament.6 Given that the total membership of the Commons was 558, nabobs were in a strong position to exert pressure on ministries whenever Indian legislation was under discussion.
Parliamentary interest in India was focused on the conduct of the Company’s officials in India. Their behaviour was scandalous; according to a hack pamphleteer of 1773:
Lacks and crowes [lakhs and crores] of rupees, sacks of diamonds, Indians tortured to disclose their treasure; cities, towns and villages ransacked and destroyed, jaghires and provinces purloined; Nabobs dethroned, and murdered, have found the delights and constituted the religions of the Directors and their servants.
The government ignored these outrages at its peril, for if the Company was not bridled in time it would become ‘subversive of the Liberties of Englishmen, and creative of a set of tyrants’.7
II
The Company had become a sort of Frankenstein’s monster, out of control and capable of wreaking havoc both in India and Britain. In the revealing words of one of its directors, it was ‘an empire within an empire’, possessing vast resources and answerable to no one but its own shareholders.8 It was essentially an alien empire: it possessed no roots in Britain, unlike the American colonies whose people were of British stock and shared British liberties and traditions. Indeed, as Clive told the Commons in 1772, India was the antithesis of Britain in terms of its political system, its rulers’ moral code, and its peoples’ freedom:
Indostan was always an absolute despotic government. The inhabitants, especially in Bengal, in inferior stations are servile, mean, submissive and humble. In superior stations they are luxurious, effeminate, tyrannical, treacherous, venal, cruel.9
Clive was in a tight spot, forced to defend his honour to a House of Commons which had been stunned by the recent revelations about his activities in Bengal. The Company also had its back to the wall in 1772, having enjoyed a brief period of unprecedented prosperity which had been followed by an unlooked-for and potentially fatal slump. News that Clive had secured the entire revenues of Bengal sparked off what turned out to be an artificial boom based upon wild exaggerations of the province’s wealth. The price of Company shares rocketed and there was a period of giddy speculation between 1767 and 1769. The bubble was pricked by reports of the invasion of Karnataka by Haidar Ali and of the Bengal famine. After 1770, the Company was wobbling and fears began to grow that it might crash, particularly after it had been driven to seek short-term loans from the Bank of England. Anxious investors, fearing that another South Sea fiasco was imminent, turned to the government for a life-line.
The financial crisis which seemed likely to break the Company placed it and Lord North’s ministry in a tricky position. On one hand, the government was confronted with demands for curbs on the Company’s activities in India and shadowy fears that somehow it posed a threat to national freedoms. On the other, it was conscious that by imposing restraints on the Company the ministry might stand accused of trampling on the rights of private property. The Company was, in the words of one of its champions, ‘a great corporate body’ with rights and privileges which had been granted by Parliament and, therefore, had the protection of the law. Its chartered liberties and possessions were sacrosanct, like those of the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge, the Church of England, and the civic corporations. Any infringement of the Company’s rights, even if undertaken for the best of reasons, was liable to be interpreted as a blow against the rights of property in general. Lord North had to tread carefully to prevent the issue of how the Company should be run from becoming a constitutional battle.
Fortunately for Lord North, the Company had already made a token submission to the government. In the summer of 1766 the then Prime Minister Lord Chatham (William Pitt the elder) had secured the Company’s agreement to an annual subvention of £400,000, which, in theory, represented payment for the assistance rendered by the army and navy during the recent war. This sum was also a contribution to the costs of the Royal Navy, which was India’s first line of defence, and the small garrison of British troops that supplemented the Company’s army. The same principle was also being applied to the American colonies, where it provoked a storm of protest which led directly to the rebellion of 1775–76. The directors of the Company did not complain; they imagined that they had got off lightly, even though the annual payments turned out to be excessive. Chatham had also toyed with the idea of taking responsibility for the government of Bengal away from the Company and placing it in the hands of the government. This was too radical and the directors and their political allies denounced the plan as an attempt to engross the Company’s patronage, which was growing in direct proportion to the enlargement of its lands.
The circumstances of 1772–73 made it easier for the Cabinet to intervene in the Company’s affairs. Its credit was dwindling and the value of its stock plummeting. The main source of its difficulties was the dramatic fall in income which followed the great Bengal famine of 1769–70. The province’s revenues had dropped to £174,300 in 1770–71 whilst overheads, such as the annual military budget of between £600,000 and £1 million, remained the same. Preoccupied with finding fresh sources of credit, the directors had to make the best bargain they could with a government which, in January 1773, obligingly sanctioned a Bank of England loan to the Company of £1 million.<
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A further blow to the Company was the tarnished reputation of its servants, who were widely regarded as a pack of brutal bloodsuckers, guilty of what the Whig leader, Lord Rockingham, called ‘rapine and oppression’ in Bengal. This had been the conclusion reached by the Commons select committee, chaired by the playwright soldier General John Burgoyne (later famous for the Saratoga débâcle of 1777), after it had disentangled the events in Bengal over the past sixteen years. When it reported to the House, the committee asked for the ‘harmonising’ of the Bengal administration with ‘the principles and spirit’ of the British constitution.
This demand was a landmark in Anglo-Indian history, in so far as it insisted that the Company’s Indian subjects deserved fair treatment and that the Company’s Indian territories were somehow within the pale of English law. This assertion was a reproof to those who had assumed that the Company was justified in perpetuating the cruel and despotic methods of the government it had inherited just because Indians had grown accustomed to them. No one would have gone so far as to argue that Indians were automatically entitled to the same consideration as Britons, but they did have a right to be governed honestly and benevolently. As a token of its concern for the legal rights of Indians, the government passed the Judicature Act of 1773, which established a Supreme Court in Calcutta whose judges were English jurists and from which appeals could be made to the Privy Council in London.
The future administrative structure of the Company’s government was established by the 1773 Regulating Act. Like all compromises, it solved some problems and created others, but it did at least make absolutely clear the British government’s right to oversee and regulate the affairs of India. Calcutta became the seat of the Company’s administration and the Governor-General of Bengal henceforward enjoyed superiority over the presidencies of Madras and Bombay. He was to be advised by a Supreme Council, with some members appointed by the Crown. There was some tinkering with the internal organisation of the Company, intended to prevent factional squabbles among its directors, and its accounts and correspondence were opened for Treasury inspection. Little was done to reform the day-to-day governance of India, although the act stipulated that in future Company officials and army officers ‘shall not accept, receive or take directly or indirectly . . . from any of the Indian princes or Powers, or their Ministers or Agents (or any natives of Asia) any Present, Gift, Donation, Opportunity or Reward’. This clause turned out to be a piece of legislative wishful thinking, for it was ignored by the men-on-the-spot whose lodestar was still the career of Clive.
Clive had survived the Parliamentary campaign of vituperation with an intact fortune but a blemished reputation. It suffered further, in the eyes of posterity, by his suicide in November 1774, although it was more likely to have been prompted by a painful illness than remorse. In the next century, Clive became something of an embarrassment for historians such as James Mill and Thomas Macaulay, for whom the Raj was one of the highest attainments of Christian civilisation. Clive was indisputably the founder of British India, but his methods and character were those of an adventurer who turned public emergencies to his own advantage. He was never, and Victorian imperialists found this unforgiveable, an idealist; he cared little for and knew less of Indian culture and did not consider it the Company’s duty to uplift and improve its new subjects. He died when the Romantic movement was gaining headway and with it a new humanitarianism; his legacy was a popular image of the Company as a tyranny which encouraged and exploited human suffering.
IV
Public disquiet at how Bengal was being governed was not dissipated by the 1773 Regulating Act. It broke surface again in May 1782, when the Commons demanded the dismissal of the Governor-General of Bengal, Warren Hastings, on the grounds that he had ‘acted in a manner repugnant to the honour and policy of the British nation’. The rumpus which followed formed the background to a two-year Parliamentary wrangle over fresh regulations for the Company. Controversy over Hastings’s objectives, methods and rewards led to his impeachment in the spring of 1786, a process which dragged on for a further nine years and ended with his acquittal.
The object of this contention had been born in 1732 into a family of decayed gentry whose last days of glory had been under the Tudors. Hastings was proud of his surname and ancestry, and among the luxuries he purchased on his first return from India in 1765 was a carriage ‘of a pleasant pompadour’ emblazoned with the ancient arms of his family. This dashing, crimson vehicle and sundry other luxuries were paid for by the £30,000 he had brought back from Calcutta, some of it made in private trade and the rest from gifts received for helping nawabs on and off their thrones. Some of the cash went on a portrait rendered by Sir Joshua Reynolds in which Hastings’s face is a mask of aristocratic hauteur. One of his hands rests on a pile of business papers, the other hangs limply, which was a nice touch since the subject swung between extremes of energy and lassitude in his public life.
By 1769 Hastings was in debt, from which he was saved by an appointment to the Madras council, and three years after he was made Governor-General of Bengal. He spent lavishly on a sumptuous household, but during his twelve years in office he managed to accumulate a fortune of roughly £218,000, an amount almost equal to his salary for the period. Among his acquisitions was a huge diamond tinged with red which was valued at £10,000 and offered to the Czaritsa Catherine, but she was not tempted.10 He was the nabob par excellence, although, like Clive, he was certain that he acted honourably, balancing private gain with public service. He explained his outlook to the Prime Minister, William Pitt the Younger, in a letter of December 1784:
It has been my Lot to desire from long Possession and casual Influence Advantages which have overcome the worst Effects of my own Deficiencies, and it has been a Maxim of my Conduct . . . to do what I knew was requisite for public safety, though I should doom my own Life to legal Forfeitures, or my name to Infamy.11
Hastings’s vision was imperial. Had it been fulfilled, he claimed in 1783, then, ‘British Dominion might by this time have acquired the Means of its Extension, through a virtual Submission to its Authority, of every region in Indostan and Deccan’.12 Creating a greater imperium in India was not what the government or the Company had wanted, especially as it involved them in a series of expensive and far from conclusive wars against Mysore and the Maratha polity.
Hastings had exceeded his brief, which had been to collect taxes, maintain civil order, administer justice and do all within his power to promote relations with the Indian states which would favour British trade.
Leaving aside Hastings’s culpability, his record as it was appreciated in Britain raised a fresh hue and cry against the Company. Towards the end of 1781 there were Whig demands for a ‘Magna Charta’ for India which, as its name suggested, was intended to end the Company’s despotism.13 The prime movers were Charles James Fox and Edmund Burke, whose India bill presented at the end of 1783 was designed to place British possessions there under direct Crown administration. Not only would this bill extend the blessings of a benevolent government to George III’s Indian subjects, it would, according to Burke, serve as a ‘guard to preserve the British Constitution from its worst corruption’ – in other words the influence of the East India Company. The Company responded with its old battlecry: ‘Our property and charter are forcibly invaded’. Five counties and forty-five boroughs rallied to its defence and petitioned the Commons on its behalf.14 George III was also alarmed by this assault on property and put pressure on the Lords, who threw out the bill. He intervened again in what had become a constitutional crisis by dissolving Parliament and calling a general election in the spring of 1784.
The nabobs and their bank balances were mobilised, and when he was returned to power the younger Pitt was able to count on over forty to swell his majority. Burke was bitter and prophesied that the government might soon be overwhelmed by these venal men, aided and abetted by Hastings when he finally returned from India. What he failed to realise was that h
is spiteful, obsessive campaign against Hastings had alienated many within the Commons, a body which has always shown misgivings about members who ride their hobby-horses relentlessly.
Having dished the Whigs, Pitt anticipated Disraeli by stealing their clothes, or at least some of them. Not wholly convinced by Burke’s allegations against Hastings, Pitt was well aware that the affairs of India needed to be placed on a new footing. The upshot was the India Act of 1784 which placed the Company’s territories under a form of dual government. The court of directors retained their old powers of patronage. Executive control of Indian affairs passed to a new body, the Board of Control, whose president was a member of the Cabinet and answerable to Parliament.
It was a cumbersome arrangement which still allowed local administrators considerable freedom of action. A despatch from Viscount Castlereagh, then president of the Board of Control, to the Governor-General, Marquess Wellesley, written on 17 December 1802, arrived in Calcutta on 6 May 1803. Another, written on 14 February 1803, was opened at Government House on 6 July 1803. There were some improvements in communications, most importantly the establishment of an express route by way of the Mediterranean and the Suez isthmus. Even so, it took between 102 and 142 days for a letter from England to reach Bombay in 1815.15