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When the Mutiny actually broke out in 1857, sepoys rushed to Delhi, where they found Bahadur Shah II, grandson of the last Mughal emperor, Shah Alam II. Aged eighty-two, and with neither subjects nor army, but enjoying the honorific title ‘King of Delhi’, the old gentleman ‘ruled’ from the Red Fort, built by Shah Jehan, Akbar’s grandson. ‘For there is not the slightest doubt,’ avers Surendra Nath Sen, ‘that the rebels wanted to get rid of the alien government and restore the old order of which the King of Delhi was the rightful representative.’41 Yet it was never as simple as a nationalist historian might aver, and if British rule depended in part on military power, it also in part relied on ‘lack of national feeling among Indians and their long habituation to domination by people of other races and religions’.42 A similar view was expressed, though far more robustly, in the standard late-nineteenth-century handbook Our Indian Empire, which warned its readers:
The races of India have less resemblance to each other than the nations of Europe. A native of Bombay or Calcutta is as much a foreigner in Peshawar or Delhi as an Englishman in Rome or Berlin. The languages of Southern India are no more intelligible in Lahore than they would be in London. India is not yet a nation, and until time and civilisation rub the edges off the sharp distinctions of caste and soften the acuteness of religious jealousies, it must remain as at present a mere patchwork of races … 43
THE HONOURABLE COMPANY
IT WAS TRADE, not any abstract concept of empire, that took the British to India in the first place. In 1600 a royal charter was granted to ‘The Governor and Company of Merchants of London, Trading into the East Indies’. Queen Elizabeth I signed the document at a time when the national economy was expanding rapidly, and was to be spared the worst aspects of decline that affected some of her commercial rivals like France, Spain and Holland. However, although there is a measure of truth in the image of the bold Elizabethan sea dog, it was actually the Portuguese and then the Dutch who made the running in the East, and the foundation of the East India Company marked a belated realisation that English merchants required the government’s backing if they were to succeed.
The Company had to gain the Mughal emperor’s permission to establish a trading base at Surat on the north-west coast. Its first negotiations with the court, then at Agra, were easily seen off by the Portuguese, long resident there. Although King James I’s representative, William Hawkins, apparently did better in 1609–11, when the Company’s fleet arrived off Surat it was rebuffed. In 1613, violence succeeded where diplomacy had failed, and two of the Company’s ships, moored downstream from Surat, drove off a Portuguese attack and traded successfully. The English went on to win a larger engagement two years later. This encouraged the emperor, who had relied on surrogate Portuguese sea power to defend his coasts, to grant the Company a firman allowing it to trade within his dominions.
The Company was still not on a smooth path to success. The Dutch remained dominant further east, and in 1623 they tortured and then murdered several traders at Amboina: compensation was not forthcoming until the 1650s after Oliver Cromwell’s military success against the Dutch. Nor was the state of English politics helpful. The early Stuarts, well aware of the contribution made by the Company to their straitened finances, did their best to support it, but the Company went through a very difficult period during and after the Civil War, emerging with a new charter in 1657. It made steady progress for the rest of the century, with Bombay replacing Surat as its main trading centre on the west coast in 1664, and the establishment of two other centres at Calcutta (1696) and Madras (1693) on the east coast, the basis of the three presidencies that were to form British India.
Yet the Company was still not secure. Unwise leadership took it to war with the Mughal empire, followed by a humiliating and costly climb-down. Domestic opposition to its monopoly saw changes which first created a new English India Company in 1698 and then, in 1709, saw the merger of the old and new into a United Company of Merchants Trading to the East Indies. It was now the Honourable East India Company, Jan Kampani, or ‘the Valiant Company’ to its Indian subjects, and thus ‘John Company’ to all and sundry. The Company became increasingly prosperous almost at once. Its armed merchantmen, with a broad buff stripe around their black hulls, were berthed at Howland Great Dock at Deptford, and underwent repair at the Company’s dockyard at Blackwall. They flew the Company’s distinctive red and white striped ensign, which first had the cross of St George in its upper canton and, from 1707, replaced this with the union flag.44 John Company’s headquarters, India House, in Leadenhall Street in the City of London, had long boasted a facade with the Company’s arms and suitable nautical iconography. In the 1720s this was given a new facade in the very best of classical taste: the Company had come of age at last.
Between 1709 and 1748 lucrative trade with the three presidencies grew steadily, with Calcutta rapidly forging ahead, partly because its hinterland, securely under Mughal rule, was comparatively stable, and in 1717 the emperor had granted the Company a firman allowing it to trade in Bengal without paying customs, all for a small annual payment of 3,000 rupees.45 Madras, in addition, sent Indian fabrics to Indonesia and received spices in return, and began to act as a staging post for trade in tea and porcelain from China. During the period the Company was not simply a reliable source of dividends to its shareholders. As a condition of its new charter it lent the government over £3 million, its annual sales of £2 million were a fifth of Britain’s imports, and taxes on this trade were an important source of national revenue.
Then, between 1748 and 1763, the picture changed dramatically. The Company had already raised its own military forces, though on a small scale, and during the War of Austrian Succession in the 1740s there had been battles between the Company’s troops and those maintained by its French rival, the Compagnie des Indes. A lasting relic of French recruitment of sepoys (itself stemming from sipahi, the Persian for soldier) was the word pultan, Indian for regiment, derived from the French peloton.46 But during the Seven Years’ War there was far more fighting. This was partly because, as in the previous conflict, rivalries initiated in Europe spilled overseas, and partly because the new Nawab of Bengal, Suraj-ud-Daula (ostensibly the emperor’s provincial governor, but in fact a quasi-independent ruler), had his own axe to grind and took on the Company, capturing Calcutta in June 1756. He had 146 of his European captives imprisoned in a cell in which 123 died overnight from heat and lack of oxygen. This episode, the infamous ‘Black Hole of Calcutta’, aroused a national revulsion exceeding even that inspired by the Amboina massacre over a century before.
Calcutta was recaptured by a force led by Admiral Watson and Colonel Robert Clive. But the crucial Red Bridge Fort was actually taken by:
… one Strahan, a common sailor belonging to [HMS] Kent, having just been served with a quantity of grog, had his spirits too much elevated to take any rest; he therefore strayed by himself towards the fort, and imperceptibly got under the walls; being advanced thus far without interruption, he took it into his head to scale at a breach that had been made by the cannon of the ships; and having luckily got upon the bastion, he discovered several men sitting on the platform, at whom he flourished his cutlass, and fired his pistol, and then, after having given three loud huzzas, cried out ‘the place is mine’.47
An exasperated soldier, no doubt looking forward to a bloody storm or dignified surrender, complained that: ‘The place was taken without the least honour to any one.’
Like so many of the paladins of British India, Robert Clive himself was not without controversy. He had sailed for India in 1743 as a writer, the most junior species of the Company’s civil service, and tried to kill himself during a fit of depression, but his pistol missed fire (there were times when the flintlock’s unreliability could be an advantage). He transferred to the Company’s military arm and in 1751 did much to frustrate French attempts to seize Madras, holding the little town of Arcot in a fifty-day siege. He reverted to the Company’s civil service
once again, and then returned to England, where his extravagant lifestyle and a botched attempt to buy his way into Parliament made him many enemies. He was back in India in 1755, intent on recovering both fortune and reputation.
He did both by beating Suraj-ud-Daula at Plassey on 23 June 1757. On the face of it Clive was hopelessly outnumbered. The Nawab of Bengal had perhaps 35,000 infantry and 15,000 cavalry, with fifty guns and as many French gunners, and Clive had some 3,000 men, just one-third of them British, and ten guns. One of his men watched the enemy deploy:
what with the number of elephants all covered with scarlet cloth and embroidery; their horse with their drawn swords glittering in the sun; their heavy cannon drawn by vast trains of oxen; and their standards flying, they made a most pompous and formidable appearance.48
Formidable in appearance, but, like many big Indian armies, less so in effect. Clive had suborned the nawab’s subordinates, and the battle became an artillery duel, in which Clive’s men had the advantage by keeping their powder dry during a sudden rainstorm. Surajud-Daula’s most reliable general, Mir Madan, was killed by a shell, and his army broke: Clive lost four Europeans and fourteen sepoys and little over twice as many wounded. The battle showed the formidable impact of a small body of troops, well led and disciplined, and underlined the fact that in India war and politics were indeed closely related in the sense that most Indian rulers usually had disaffected relatives or ministers who might be bribed. And as Penderel Moon trenchantly observed:
The men who comprised Indian armies did not fight for Bengal, Oudh, the Carnatic or other area with some linguistic or ethnic character, much less for larger abstractions such as the Mogul empire or Hindustan. They fought for the rulers or commanders who paid them to do so, generally at this time Muslims, but also Hindus, and the French and English; and such loyalty as they felt to their employers, all the greater to those who paid them promptly and led them to victory.49
The notion of iqbal, or good fortune, was also important: men were attracted by an individual or an agency which seemed to be enjoying a run of good luck. In 1757 the Company’s iqbal shone, and Mir Jafar, the new nawab, was suitably grateful, and gave it the zamindari of twenty-four tax districts covering 800 square miles – its first substantial landholding.
Scarcely less significant, although a good deal less well known, is Colonel Eyre Coote’s victory over the French at Wandiwash in January 1760. Here again the lessons were clear: there was little virtue in retiring before a superior force, and once battle was joined cohesion was all. ‘The cannonading now began to be smart on both sides,’ wrote Coote, ‘and upon seeing the enemy come boldly up, I ordered the army to move forward.’ ‘When we came within 60 yards of them,’ remembered Major Graham of HM’s 84th, a regiment raised in 1759 specifically for service in India,
our platoons began to fire. I had the honour to lead the 84th against the Lorraine Regiment on their right, which were resolved to break us, being as they said a raw young regiment, but we had not fired above four rounds before they went to the right about in the utmost confusion.50
Coote went on to capture the French enclave of Pondicherry the following year, and the war ended with French hopes for India dashed for ever.
Clive returned to England with a substantial fortune and in 1762 was given a peerage by the grateful government. But he had also been made a mansabdar with the rank of 6,000 foot and 5,000 horse by the emperor, and received a jagir worth £28,000 a year from Mir Jafar, for which the Company was to act as zamindar, remitting the money to Clive once it had been collected. The episode highlighted the ambivalence of Clive’s position: at once the Company’s servant and yet an entrepreneur in his own right, and a spectacular example of what was euphemistically called ‘the taking of presents’ might produce.
Clive had been involved in a furious dispute with the Company when the marked deterioration of its position in Bengal encouraged the directors to appoint him Commander in Chief and send him back to India in 1765, allowing him sweeping civil and military powers. The Company had come into conflict with Shujah-ud-Daulah, ruler of Oudh, a semi-independent province of the empire adjacent to its own Bengal emporium. In 1763 Shujah-ud-Daulah allied himself with Mir Kasim, the new (and, until recently, British-backed) Nawab of Bengal. Forced out of Bengal by Major Hector Munro, a tough disciplinarian who had stamped hard on indiscipline amongst the Company’s forces in Bengal, the nawabs fell back and joined the emperor who was abroad with a good-sized army on a tax-gathering expedition. On 23 October 1764, Munro, with 900 Europeans and 7,000 sepoys beat the allies, with 50,000 men at Buxar, a battle which ‘marked more truly than Plassey the beginning of British dominion in India’.51 When he arrived, Clive pressed his advantage, raising fresh troops, ensuring the succession of a pro-British Nawab of Bengal, and then coercing the emperor into making the Company revenue collector for his provinces of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa.
Like it or not, the Company was now a territorial authority in its own right. It was painfully evident that the Company’s directors in London, under pressure from politicians and shareholders, could not really control what went on in India, all the more because, as the diarist Horace Walpole observed, they were now trying to rule ‘nations to whom it takes a year to send out orders’. It was not even easy for officials on the spot to understand the complexities of tax-gathering, and in 1772 the Company auctioned off tax-gathering rights to local men who were often the former zamindars themselves.
There were nest-feathering opportunities on a breathtaking scale. In his two years as Governor of Madras, 1778–80, Sir Thomas Rumbold amassed a fortune of £750,000, a third of which came in bribes and pay-offs from the local ruler, the Nawab of Arcot. Although he was the subject of both parliamentary and Company inquiries, Rumbold blithely shrugged off attempts to make him disgorge the loot and died a rich man. More junior officials who behaved in a similar way, however, might not be so lucky. Lieutenant John Corneille described how in 1755, Lieutenant Colonel Heron of the Company’s service was tasked with collecting revenue for the Nawab of Arcot only to be convicted by court martial of siphoning off part of the proceeds. He was stripped of his commission ‘and thereby rendered incapable of further service’. ‘I cannot but look upon Colonel Heron as guilty,’ wrote Corneille,
and I am confirmed in that opinion by the fact that the gentleman in the space of a few months found means to accumulate about twelve thousand pounds. It may be said, and it has been said by many, that as in most points he acted in a manner agreeable to custom his sentence was severe. But can that general ruling power [i.e. custom] subvert the rule of justice and make the fault less?52
As a junior King’s officer, Corneille’s own chances of shaking the pagoda tree were somewhat limited; but King’s officers were not entirely immune from greed. Clive, who did not like Eyre Coote, complained acidly that he was ‘a great stickler for the rights and privileges of a Royal officer, not least his own emoluments and allowances’. When Coote returned home to England in 1763 (having stopped en route at St Helena to marry the Governor’s daughter), he had enough money to purchase a substantial country estate in Hampshire, and was further gratified by the presentation of a handsome sword worth £700.
Coote, in short, had become a nabob – a man who had made his fortune in India and then invested it, as any successful London merchant might have done, in land: the word originated in English mispronunciation of the title nawab. Coote was the sixth son of an Irish clergyman, whose military career surmounted a setback in 1745 when, as an ensign in Blakeney’s regiment, he appeared in Edinburgh after the defeat at Prestonpans, happily still with his colour but, less wisely, well in advance of his regiment’s survivors. A court martial stopped short of cashiering him, as a lot of people had run away that day, but a furious George II thought ‘the crime so infamous in nature’ that he had ‘no further occasion’ for the services of the officers involved.53 Coote, with his refurbished military reputation and wellbred wife, could at least claim gentility. B
ut many other nabobs could not, and the homeward rush of merchants desiring not simply landed property but the titles, prestige and social distinction that went with it exasperated not only the gentry who dominated Georgian England, but also merchants and tradesmen who found it harder to scrub the ink from their fingers. The nabobs tinkled into Parliament in force in the 1768 election, and in 1771 the play The Nabobs sent up the whole gang, turning the word into one of envious abuse.
Clive’s gains had already involved the Company in costly wars, and more followed as senior officials supported local rulers against their rivals for their own and the Company’s benefit, though it was sometimes hard to see where the two joined. The First Mysore War (1767–69) saw the Company ally itself with the Nawab of Arcot in an inconclusive campaign against the formidable Hyder Ali, a capable adventurer who had risen to become sultan of the southern state of Mysore. The episode caused widespread criticism, and – with the volatility of the Company’s stock, the apparent inability of its directors to control their employees, widespread resentment of nabobbery, and something of a genuine sense of moral outrage – fuelled public and parliamentary demands for reform. William Pitt the elder lamented that:
The riches of Asia have been poured in upon us, and have brought not only Asiatic luxury, but, I fear, Asiatic principles of government. Without connections, without natural interest in the soil, the importers of foreign gold have forced their way into Parliament by such a torrent of private corruption as no hereditary fortune could resist.54