by John Keay
16
The British Conquest
1750–1820
BENGAL LANCED
THE BRITISH would often think of their conquests in India as fortuitous. It gratified a cherished conceit about the Englishman’s amateurish innocence and it obviated the need to confront awkward questions – like how such aggression could be justified. Clive himself, normally neither temperate nor cautious, would agonise long and hard over whether to assume what he called ‘the sovereignty of Bengal’. Twenty years later the polymath Sir William Jones would marvel at how Bengal had, like an over-ripe mango, ‘fallen into England’s lap while she was sleeping’. Even Warren Hastings, Jones’s patron and the first British Governor-General of India, would shy from the idea of the all-India dominion with whose foundation he is rightly credited; it was something ‘which I may not mention without adding that it is what I never wish to see’.1
Picking up on such breezy disclaimers, historians of the British Raj have generally explained its triumph less in terms of the push of conquest and more in terms of the pull of chaos. The Company was ‘sucked into’ the ‘power vacuum’ left by the declining Mughal empire. No native regime rose to fill this ‘black hole’, authority fragmented, and economic decline threatened. The ‘lawlessness’ of Afghans, Marathas and other ‘warlords’ brought cries for protection which necessitated an elaborate British-sponsored system of ‘ring-fencing’ based on subsidiary alliances which would embrace most of the subcontinent. Territorial acquisitions and local forms of resistance, as also administrative and fiscal anomalies, invited political, judicial and revenue ‘settlements’. Suggestive of a pillowed repose, these ‘settlements’ were supposedly designed to restore a traditional order which, while advantageous to the British regime, would bring security and prosperity to all.
Such views have since been revised. It is argued that the ‘chaos’ and the ‘vacuum’ were in part of the Company’s own making, in part an invention of its apologists, and in part the result of a misreading of India’s history. Economic decline before the late eighteenth century cannot be substantiated. The vitality of the market in revenue rights and commercial concessions already noticed is taken as evidence of dynamism rather than decay. Regional regimes were not inconsistent with India’s political and cultural traditions. And powerful successor states, like those of Bengal, Hyderabad (the Nizam), Pune (the Peshwa), Mysore (Haidar Ali) and Lahore (the Sikhs), were waxing impressively beneath the vault of Mughal authority until extinguished or suborned by the expansionist ambitions of the Company.
These expansionist ambitions, taken in the context of a global imperialism, are often explained simply in terms of greed. Much emphasis is laid on the fortunes acquired by individual Company men, the so-called ‘nabobs’, and on the exploitative character of the policies pursued by their employer. Testimony to personal fortunes is plentiful, especially amongst the condemnations of scandalised and jealous countrymen in England; systematic exploitation, although harder to quantify, is inferred from numerous examples of Indian protest and is linked with the great famine of 1770, which may have killed a quarter of Bengal’s population.
But in an India where revenue extraction was the main business of government and where personal fortunes were not readily distinguished from official receipts, British rapacity attracted much less attention than it did in England. Under the later Mughals as under their ‘Great’ predecessors, power and prestige depended on conquests and access to revenue. Conversely conquests and access to revenue depended on power and prestige. Greed was as much the essence of government as it was of commerce. Merchants who became rulers happily adjusted their sights without experiencing any great conflict of interests. And although it would be hard to prove that either the Company or its servants espoused loftier ideals, it would also be hard to prove that any of their Indian rivals were motivated otherwise.
What did distinguish the British was their sense of being outsiders. Race, creed, culture and colour set them glaringly apart; so did their well-developed consciousness of a national identity. They might, and would, quarrel sensationally. Additionally, British government policy would often be at variance with that of the Company’s London directors, London directives (if still relevant by the time they reached India) would often be ignored by the Company’s senior administration in Calcutta, and Calcutta’s interests were often flouted by the subsidiary administrations in Madras and Bombay. Coherent policies are hard to distinguish; it was the ad hoc and reactive nature of British expansion which convinced so many that dominion was fortuitous. But if coherence was lacking, cohesion was not. Despite the opportunities for personal enrichment and despite the Indophile interests of ‘brahmanised’ scholars like Sir William Jones, loyalties to regiment, service, Company, Crown and country would prove tenacious. British rule would be as impervious to India’s powers of assimilation and as unsusceptible to fragmentation as it was unchallenged by succession crises. Authority was continuous, allegiance consistent. Herein lay a source of strength which was arguably more decisive than either economic advantage or military discipline. No other contender for power in India could present such a united front; no other foreign invader could maintain such a prolonged challenge.
The recapture of Calcutta by Clive and Watson in late 1756, their storming of nearby French Chandernagore in early 1757, and Clive’s success at Plassey in June 1757, although later seen as milestones, would attract little contemporary comment in Mughal Delhi. Bengal had long since slipped from imperial control, and its quarrelsome European trading companies were still seen as peripheral and parasitic appendages in the great scheme of Mughal hierarchy. Moreover ‘the Famous Two Hundred Days’ so celebrated by the British happened to coincide with a winter of still greater infamy for the Mughal emperor, for in January the imperial capital was sacked by a more traditional predator in the shape of Ahmad Shah Abdali. An Afghan of the Durrani clan, Abdali was following in the hoofprints of earlier raiders from the skirts of the Hindu Kush like Mahmud of Ghazni and Muhammad of Ghor. The attack on Delhi was the climax of his fourth invasion of the Panjab, most of which province he had previously wrested from its Mughal governor and whence he had already conquered Kashmir.
Nor was his plunder of the capital itself unprecedented. Seventeen years earlier Abdali had served in the forces of Nadir Shah, a latterday Timur who, having usurped the throne of Persia and seized Kandahar and Kabul, had swept across the Panjab to rout an imperial army at Karnal. Thence, in 1739, Nadir had entered Delhi as the emperor’s voracious guest. This amicable fiction lasted barely forty-eight hours. For some casual spilling of Persian blood Delhi’s citizens paid a gruesome price as Nadir Shah ordered a general massacre. Twenty thousand may have been butchered in a single day, and further carnage followed as the Persians concentrated on the extortion of family heirlooms and hidden treasure. Muhammad Shah, the long-reigning emperor so celebrated for his inactivity, was ignominiously recrowned by his vanquisher. Then, following fifty-eight days of excess which would be remembered long after British ‘nabobs’ had become a bad joke, Nadir Shah departed Delhi with coin valued at eight or nine millions sterling plus a similar hoard in gold and silver objects. ‘And this does not include the jewels, which were inestimable.’2 Amongst them were Shah Jahan’s Peacock Throne and the Koh-i-Nur diamond, which gem thus again passed into Persian possession. (How, if it was the same as Humayun’s diamond, it had slipped from Persian possession in the first place is not certainly known. It may have been the stone reportedly gifted by Shah Tamasp of Persia to the Sultan of Golconda and then presented to Aurangzeb by Mir Jumla. Howsoever, it was soon on its way back towards India, having already passed from Nadir Shah’s grandson to Ahmad Shah Abdali.)
In 1756 Abdali found the imperial treasury somewhat bare, ‘but Delhi was plundered, and its unhappy people again subjected to pillage, and its daughters to pollution.’3 The city of Mathura shared a like fate and Agra only narrowly avoided it. Confirmed in the possession of Sind as well as Kashmir and t
he Panjab, Abdali retired to Afghanistan. He would be back for more in 1760–1 and on that occasion would inflict a crushing defeat on the Marathas at Panipat. But suffice it here to note that in the late 1750s the rapacity of the British in Bengal was not exceptional. By contemporary standards it might even be described as restrained. As Clive would notoriously aver to a parliamentary committee which would eventually investigate his conduct in India, the opportunities which awaited him after Plassey had been almost unimaginable.
A great prince was dependent on my pleasure; an opulent city lay at my mercy; its richest bankers bid against one another for my smiles; I walked through vaults which were thrown open to me alone, piled on either side with gold and jewels. Mr Chairman, at this moment I stand astonished at my own moderation!4
Nor, by contemporary standards, was there anything particularly novel or outrageous about the means by which Clive and his men engineered their so-called ‘revolution’. It has been argued that at the time Bengal, although ‘not an oasis in a war torn India’, remained more stable and prosperous than other provinces of the Mughal empire. ‘For most of the [eighteenth] century the Nawabs and the British were able to maintain some kind of unity over an area extending hundreds of miles up the Ganges valley, at least as far as Patna. Beneath their umbrella the zamindars enforced a tolerably stable order.’5 This was what made the region so attractive to foreign adventurers, and it was not something which they wanted to disturb. Clive’s ‘revolution’ was designed simply to replace an unsuitable nawab. It was not meant to subvert the existing order, rather to stabilise it.
Bengal’s comparative prosperity, as also its autonomy, dated from the turn of the century and the appointment, a decade after Child’s ‘Mughal War’, of a man later known as Murshid Quli Khan. Born a brahman in the Deccan, the much-renamed Murshid Quli Khan had been purchased, converted, adopted, and then inducted into Mughal service by one of Aurangzeb’s Persian amirs in the Deccan. Exceptional ability won him the diwani, or chancellorship, of Hyderabad and from there in 1701 he had been sent to boost the revenues of Bengal. Like Sher Shah and Todar Mal before him, he compiled new revenue rolls, established an efficient system of collection run largely by Hindus (or farmed out to them), and ruthlessly enforced it. He also transferred most existing jagirs from the richer parts of Bengal to less-easily-taxed regions in Orissa. What are now West Bengal and Bangladesh thus became predominantly khalsa, their land revenues in other words being due directly to the emperor via the person of his brilliant diwan.
Receipts had immediately increased. Remitted to Aurangzeb in the Deccan, they helped to finance his vendetta against the Marathas. Indeed the emperor was so impressed that he now renamed his diwan as ‘Murshid Quli Khan’ after a revered official who had organised the revenues of the Deccan province following its conquest by Shah Jahan. Aurangzeb also upheld his diwan’s authority in the face of a challenge from the subahdar, or governor, of Bengal. In effect, Murshid Quli Khan thus came to exercise the rights of both offices. He removed from Dacca to found a new capital at ‘Murshidabad’ and for twenty years after Aurangzeb’s death, as emperors rose and fell in Delhi, he continued to remit some ten million rupees a year to the imperial treasury. Farrukhsiyar, the emperor responsible for the Company’s cherished farman, acknowledged him as governor, and Muhammad Shah confirmed his (Murshid Quli Khan’s) son-in-law as his successor. In all but name, of which he had enough, Murshid Quli Khan was the first Nawab of Bengal and the founder of an autonomous kingdom.
His son-in-law ‘reigned’ from 1727 until 1739, ‘an aera [sic] of good order and good government’ according to a Company official.6 The good government continued under Nawab Alivardi Khan (1740–56). But following Nadir Shah’s humbling of the Mughal emperor, Bengal’s revenues ceased to be sent to Delhi as matter of course. Moreover, since Alivardi Khan was a usurper, he faced other challenges, most notably from the Marathas. In the 1740s the Bhonsles of Nagpur mounted almost annual raids into Bengal’s territories, ravaging to the gates of Murshidabad and persuading the British in Calcutta to dig a ‘Maratha Ditch’ round their settlement. In the event, the Marathas never crossed the Hughli river, let alone the Ditch, and in 1751 they were bought off by the nawab’s cession of Orissa. But a taste of ‘fiscal terrorism’, first from the Marathas and then from the hard-pressed nawab as he mobilised against them, occasioned much hardship. This dislocation, plus the security supposedly afforded by Calcutta’s defences and the concessionary tariffs and other favourable trading terms conferred by the farman, prompted rapid and unplanned growth within the Company’s Calcutta enclave. The anchorage and settlement of 1690 had by 1750 become the busiest port-city in Bengal with a population of 120,000. Contemporary engravings show stately riverside mansions, town terraces and public buildings with pillars and pediments. Not shown are the less salubrious suburbs, known in Madras as ‘Black Town’, where the bulk of the population worked and lived.
To Alivardi Khan as Nawab of Bengal Calcutta’s success was both irritating and tempting. But wisely preferring the golden eggs to the big white geese which laid them, he dealt as fairly with the British as with his other nesting colonies of French and Dutch merchants; he merely demanded of them additional, but always negotiable, subsidies. His successor and grandson, Siraj-ud-daula, proved less of a conservationist, indeed ‘imprudent to the highest degree’. Within a year he had alienated his grandfather’s officials, his greatest zamindars, his major bankers and all the European trading companies. ‘His ultimate achievement was perhaps to make Frenchmen in Bengal hope that the English would defeat him.’7 Considering that the Seven Years’ War was about to pitch the European rivals into global confrontation, this was no mean feat. Siraj enjoys the distinction of having challenged not just one bumptious merchant community but seemingly the entire mercantilist presumption.
This should make him an obvious candidate for nationalist rehabilitation. But Siraj has found few champions amongst even Bengal’s rabid revisionists, perhaps because his ejection of the British was not obviously intended. His demands – concerning the surrender of certain dissidents who had taken refuge in Calcutta, the demolition of unauthorised fortifications like the ‘Maratha Ditch’, and the withdrawal of trading concessions not clearly specified in the farman – were neither unreasonable nor original. A willingness to resolve them, or a cash offer to that effect, might well have satisfied him. But channels of communication between the new nawab and the European Companies had barely been opened, and Calcutta’s governing council was exceptionally supine. It was also dangerously complacent. ‘Such was the levity of the times,’ recalled the city’s adjutant-general, ‘that severe measures were not deemed necessary.’8 The city itself had long since engulfed the walls of Fort William and was probably indefensible. When Siraj appeared on the other side of the Maratha Ditch with a large army, British confusion positively invited attack.
Although the fighting lasted five days, no serious attempt was made to open the negotiations which might still have saved Calcutta. Successive British withdrawals culminated in a panic-stricken dash to the ships, and Siraj suddenly found himself master of the city. He also found himself responsible for an assortment of European men, women and children who had failed to get away. Unharmed, they were lodged overnight in the fort’s detention cell, otherwise ‘the Black Hole’. How many went in is not certainly known; but next morning only twenty-three staggered out. Dehydration and suffocation had accounted for possibly fifty lives.
The tragedy seems to have been quite unintentional. Nevertheless, Siraj was held responsible. Dramatised and magnified by the survivors, the Black Hole greatly reduced the nawab’s chances of restoring relations with the British and lent to Clive’s retaliation a self-righteous venom. When seven months later Clive and Admiral Watson fought their way back up the Hughli river and easily retook the city, it was Clive who, against strong resistance from his colleagues, insisted on continuing the war. Peace on demeaning terms was offered to Siraj only for as long as it took the Bri
tish to defeat the French at Chandernagore, a move for which the timely news of the outbreak of the Seven Years’ War provided justification. With the risk of a French attack removed, Clive resumed hostilities against the nawab and proceeded upriver towards Murshidabad. Meanwhile Siraj’s army took up a defensive position at Plassey.
Had the supposed battle of Plassey actually been fought, it is far from certain that Siraj would have lost it. The numerical odds, at perhaps fifty thousand to three thousand, were heavily in his favour; so was the disposition of his troops; and despite the superiority of the Company’s guns, the initial artillery exchanges proved indecisive. Clive himself seems quickly to have despaired of a straight victory and to have rested his hopes entirely on the treachery of Mir Jafar and other dignitaries amongst the nawab’s commanders with whom he had already signed a secret pact. When, after some delay, Mir Jafar opted to honour this pledge and duly made his hostile sentiments clear to Siraj, the nawab had little choice but to flee. Deserted by well over half his army, he was indeed as much the victim of a revolution as a rout.
Mir Jafar was related to Siraj as well as being his commander-in-chief. He had as good a claim to succeed him as anyone. It was in fact a standard palace revolution not unlike that which had resulted in Alivardi Khan’s installation. Arrangements were swiftly made to have Mir Jafar’s accession recognised by the emperor in Delhi, while Clive publicly insisted that the Company would not interfere in his government.
