The next day, upon fording the river, Clive’s army set up camp after sunset in a mango grove near Plassey, north of Calcutta, within a mile of the enemy. Clive spent the night lying awake, listening to the drums and cymbals of the enemy camp. It is hard to imagine a person subject to more pressure and consequent anxiety.
The next morning, June 23, 1757, the two armies met at Plassey. The nawab’s cavalry alone numbered fifteen thousand. Then there were the forty thousand infantrymen armed with pikes and swords, bows and arrows. But only twelve thousand troops would take part in the battle. The British-led forces numbered a mere three thousand of which a thousand were English. Both sides unleashed their cannons. Whereas Surajah Dowlah’s field pieces failed to fire properly, those of the British “produced great effect,” killing some of the most distinguished officers in the nawab’s ranks. The nawab’s forces began to retreat, and one of Clive’s officers, seizing the initiative, ordered a full-scale advance. The battle lasted barely an hour. As Macaulay writes, “With the loss of twenty-two soldiers killed and fifty wounded, Clive had scattered an army of nearly sixty thousand men, and subdued an empire larger and more populous than Great Britain.”*
With the British victory, Meer Jaffier replaced Surajah Dowlah on the throne. Dowlah was murdered for his crimes, a grisly act, however deserving the victim might have been. While the British played no direct part in it, the murder was one to which they had set the political context.
More troubling to British sensibilities was the amount of money that changed hands. Meer Jaffier sent 800,000 pounds sterling in silver downriver to Calcutta, of which Clive helped himself to between 200,000 and 300,000. Clive literally “walked between heaps of gold and silver, crowned with rubies and diamonds.” There was nothing strictly illegal in this. Clive was a general not of the crown, but of the company, and the company had indicated that its agents could enrich themselves by means of the generosity of the native princes. Macaulay even suggests that it was a wonder that Clive did not take more, but adds:
we cannot acquit of having done what, if it not in itself was evil, was yet of evil example.… It follows that whatever rewards he receives for his services ought to be given either by his own government, or with the full knowledge and approbation of his own government.33
The problem with Clive is that being a larger-than-life risk taker, who operated in a savage, frontier environment in which he made up his own rules accordingly, the very traits that allowed him to form the foundations for a British empire in India, were also the ones that make us uneasy. But there was certainly, as Macaulay indicates, an element of hypocrisy in the opprobrium that greeted him back in England. “It was a very easy exercise of virtue to declaim in England against Clive’s rapacity; but not one in a hundred of his accusers would have shown so much self-command in the treasury of Moorshedabad.”34
And not one in a hundred would have shown so much audacity, repeatedly willing to risk an entire reputation on yet another throw of the dice. When in 1759 seven Dutch ships arrived in the Hooghly from Java, Clive would have been within his rights to accept their presence. Meer Jaffier favored the Dutch as a balancer against the British, and Clive was loath to upset his relationship with his own chosen nawab. Moreover, London was already engaged in a war with the French and could least afford another enemy. Yet knowing how the Dutch presence would threaten Britain’s emerging hold on India, Clive ordered an attack completely on his own, and the Dutch were subsequently routed.
Indeed, it was Clive whom the British authorities sent back to India in 1765 to clean up the corruption and disorganization in the government of Bengal that had ensued in his absence, and was the result of a system that he was partly responsible for erecting. Though he remained in India only eighteen months, in that time he accomplished a comprehensive reform of the British East India Company, including the way it dealt with the indigenous population. The root of Clive’s reforms was his understanding that to give men power, and at the same time to keep them poor, was an invitation to rampant corruption. Thus, a centerpiece of his reform was to raise the salaries of company employees. He accomplished this by giving employees a share of the revenue of the salt trade according to their rank, an act that caused greater damage in some quarters to Clive’s reputation than much else that he did. Clive’s ultimate tragedy was that he often knew what had to be done, and did not shy away from doing it, even as what had to be done was never for the pure at heart. Of course, this holds true for many men, but it is particularly so with Clive, whose choices and temptations—and their consequences—were of a momentous scope. Here, again, is Macaulay:
If a man has sold beer on Sunday morning, it is no defence that he has saved the life of a fellow-creature at the risk of his own.… But it is not in this way that we ought to deal with men who, raised far above ordinary restraints, and tried by far more than ordinary temptations, are entitled to a more than ordinary measure of indulgence.35
In a manner of speaking, Clive gave Britain India, and Britain was not altogether grateful because of the way in which he did it. Thus, he was to be hounded in middle age by critics, to the point where his manic-depressive nature finally caught up with him. He took up the opium habit, and at the age of forty-nine committed suicide (though some belief holds that he might have been murdered).36
When he died in 1774, Clive was the greatest English general since James Wolfe died at the victorious Battle of Quebec fifteen years earlier (even as “his corruption would be equally denounced as somehow un-British”).37 Almost alone among Western military leaders, Clive had no experienced generals around him on whose advice he could fall back. He was a military autodidact who, unlike other agents of the British East India Company, saw beyond commercial goals to political and geographical supremacy. Macaulay writes: “The only man, as far as we recollect, who at an equally early age ever gave equal proof of talents of war, was Napoleon Bonaparte.”38
Macaulay suggests even that had Clive not fallen into illness and depression and taken up opium while still in middle age—had Clive still been what he was when he defeated the Dutch near Calcutta—he might have commanded British forces in North America and the history of the American Revolution might have been different, with independence deferred for some years. Indeed, it is impossible to know for sure what would have happened had George Washington been forced to face Robert Clive in battle.* For history is about more than just geography and other impersonal forces.
Sailing back upriver in the evening and reentering Kolkata, my boat passed under the cantilever Howrah Bridge, the city’s urban icon. The bridge was constructed during World War II to provide British divisions access to the Burmese front. From any direction, it appears like a gargantuan Erector set, taking up half the sky, its draperies of steel dwarfing everything around it. Both human and vehicular traffic are bumper-to-bumper, toe-to-heel on its span, as masses of people cross the Hooghly, the color of faded cardboard from the silt that it carries downstream. Even from the water down below, the noise of the crowd and of the cars is like the din of a locomotive perpetually passing. Fancy new motorcycles idle next to hand-pulled rickshaws. People carry everything from briefcases to birdcages; crates and baskets rest on their heads. Just below the entrance to the bridge on the Kolkata side is a bustling flower market with mountains of marigolds and rose petals. Hawkers sell everything from razor blades to textiles. The pleas of beggars and the in-your-face solicitations are unceasing. Nobody gives up here.
* Macaulay’s Essay on Lord Clive, edited with notes and an introduction by Preston C. Farrar (1840; reprint, New York: Longmans, Green, 1910). In many ways Macaulay held a condescending view of India. See Salman Rushdie’s summary of Macaulay’s attitudes in The Moor’s Last Sigh (New York: Pantheon, 1995), p. 376. For a fuller biography of Clive, see Robert Harvey, Clive: The Life and Death of a British Emperor (New York: St. Martin’s, 1998).
† It was a gradual process, however. Following Clive’s subjugation of Bengal, the British hold on the Subconti
nent was mainly limited to northern India, Bombay, and the Carnatic coastal plain. For a time the rest of the south would be divided among feudals and the Maratha confederacy.
* According to one explanation, the word may come from the local Dravidian terms kar (black) and nadu (country), a reference to the black soil of the region.
* Geoffrey Moorhouse, Calcutta: The City Revealed (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971), pp. 44–45. One of the survivors was John Zephaniah Holwell, a brilliant publicist, whose retelling of the incident helped spread the word of the horror. See Keay, Honourable Company, p. 304.
* See, in particular, Nick Robins’s The Corporation That Changed the World: How the East India Company Shaped the Modern Multinational (Hyderabad, India: Orient Longman, 2006). John Keay disagrees, however, noting, “In the context of a revolution, and compared to some of the intrigues conducted by others (British as well as Indian), this little piece of duplicity would scarcely rate a mention.” Harvey agrees. Keay, The Honourable Company: A History of the English East India Company (London: HarperCollins, 1991), p. 317; Robert Harvey, Clive: The Life and Death of a British Emperor (New York: St. Martin’s, 1998).
* John Keay, The Honourable Company: A History of the English East India Company (London: HarperCollins, 1991), pp. 52–53. Putting words in Clive’s mouth, Mark Twain added: “With three thousand I whipped sixty thousand and founded the Empire.” Mark Twain, Following the Equator (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), ch. 54. Some writers claim that Plassey was less a battle than a “transaction,” by which the nawab’s internal enemies negotiated with the East India Company to arrange his defeat. K. M. Panikkar, Asia and Western Dominance (London: Allen & Unwin, 1959), pp. 78–79. But Robert Harvey pours scorn on this notion; Clive: The Life and Death of a British Emperor (New York: St. Martin’s, 1998), p. 221.
* But Clive favored a liberal, less confrontational approach to the American colonists. Harvey, Clive, p. 349.
CHAPTER TEN
OF STRATEGY AND BEAUTY
Two prominent landmarks, not far from each other in Kolkata, are each associated with a great figure from the city’s past, a figure central to the ideas and ideals that will drive politics and culture in the twenty-first century throughout the Indian Ocean and the larger world. One is an imperial statesman; the other a man of arts and letters. The one was a practitioner of realpolitik, concerned with maneuvering amid different political-military forces and other naked geopolitical interests; the other a man concerned with aesthetics, who understood that the ultimate end of consciousness is the appreciation of beauty. The one embodies the British legacy in Greater India; the other that part of the Indian legacy which represents the dreams of many beyond India’s frontiers. The one leads us to a discussion of India’s foreign policy; the other to a discussion on the search for justice and dignity that the United States needs to better understand. Each man is totemic of Kolkata: Calcutta the imperial capital of British India, and Kolkata the home of millions who seek to be heard.
The first landmark is Government House (the Raj Bhavan in Hindi), the home a little more than a hundred years ago to Lord George Nathaniel Curzon.
Until the early twentieth century, when India’s capital was moved to Delhi, Calcutta constituted the throbbing heart of British imperialism in Eurasia. And that India-centric imperialism is associated with no man so much as Lord George Curzon, the viceroy of India from 1899 to 1905. To say that Curzon felt at home in India and in Calcutta is quite literally true. In a case of supreme symbolic coincidence, the gorgeous brick Government House—the viceroy’s headquarters, completed in Georgian style in 1803—was based on the plan of Kedleston Hall, Curzon’s twelfth-century ancestral home in Derbyshire.
Despite their aversion to British rule, Indians have retained a special place in their hearts for Curzon, who did much to rescue the country’s architecture and antiquities from ruin. “After every other viceroy has been forgotten,” India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, once remarked, “Curzon will be remembered because he restored all that was beautiful in India.”1
Particularly since the end of the Cold War, regard for Curzon has grown in some circles here despite the fact that as viceroy he partitioned Bengal into eastern and western halves: a divide-and-rule tactic that robbed Calcutta of a lucrative, predominantly Muslim hinterland, and established a precedent for the secession of East Pakistan from India and later the emergence of Bangladesh. Indeed, J. N. Dixit, India’s foreign secretary in the early 1990s, called Curzon “among the greatest of the Indian nationalists.” C. Raja Mohan, a professor at New Delhi’s Nehru University, explains that all of his countrymen who now dream of a Greater India—a zone of quiet and informal influence reaching across much of southern Asia and the Indian Ocean—find Curzon “a source of strategic inspiration.”2
In 1909, Curzon writes:
the master of India, must, under modern conditions, be the greatest power in the Asiatic Continent, and, therefore, it may be added, in the world.3
The India to which Curzon refers (and over which he ruled) now covers four states: India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Burma—that is, all the mainland territory from the Iranian border to the Gulf of Thailand. This Greater India naturally required, in Curzon’s view, buffer states to the west and north to protect it against Russia and China. Thus, in 1901, under Curzon’s direction, the ethnic-Pushtun North-West Frontier Province came into being as a means for British India to apply pressure on Afghanistan by controlling the tribal areas abutting it. Today, the North-West Frontier Province survives in name and fact as a means for Pakistan to do exactly the same.
But it was not only a compliant Central Asia that Curzon sought, but a compliant Persia, too, notes David Gilmour in his comprehensive biography Curzon: Imperial Statesman. During Curzon’s viceroyalty, British India was the principal power in the Arabian Gulf, with exceptionally strong trading links to Persia, Mesopotamia, and the Gulf sheikhdoms, which, in turn, facilitated India’s economic reach farther afield in East Africa. For example, the United Arab Emirates (Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and Sharjah) constitute the former Trucial States, so called because they signed a “truce” with the British to contain piracy in the Gulf, and thus secure the trade route from Europe to India via the Middle East. Meanwhile, on British India’s eastern frontier, in Burma, a class of Indian traders and moneymen provided credit and other services to Burmese peasants, thus helping to fortify the viceroy’s imperial reach. Whereas Persia and Afghanistan were British buffer states against Russia in the west and northwest, the Shan States of Burma were buffers against France and its empire in Southeast Asia to the east.
The viceroy in Calcutta did not merely take orders from Whitehall, for the “architecture” of the British Empire was built around India.4 The viceroy was a power in his own right, influencing affairs from Aden to Malacca—the entire span of the Indian Ocean. That power derived ultimately from India’s own size and wealth, leveraged by its link to London. Nowadays, if you replace London with Washington—or, perhaps, replace it with a triangular relationship with both Washington and Beijing—you have, as some Indians define it, a “neo-Curzonian” situation.
Neo-Curzonism is a tendency among those Indian strategic thinkers who anticipate continued economic growth in their country, and a foreign policy that should follow from it. It might be tempting to compare it to American neoconservatism. After all, it is an imperial-like vision that desires national greatness based on big ideas. But whereas neoconservatives seek to impose America’s ideals and system of governance abroad, neo-Curzonians are content with alliances with nondemocratic systems different from India’s own. Neo-Curzonians understand limits. They seek a return to Indian preeminence mainly within India’s geographical sphere of influence.
This is a vision less crude in spirit than the Greater India (Akhand Bharat) wished for by Hindu nationalists, and should not be confused with it. Whereas neo-Curzonians are more oriented to the Subcontinent’s western frontier, seeking to expand India�
�s influence in the Middle East, Hindu nationalists are oriented toward the east—to Southeast Asia and Indonesia—which have been heavily influenced by India’s Sanskrit culture. Still, Curzon enjoyed especial prestige during the Hindu nationalist government of the Bharatiya Janata Party in the 1990s, when he was quoted frequently.
Quoting him served as a rebuke to India’s foreign policy during the Cold War, a time when (according to Jaswant Singh, the foreign minister from 1998 to 2002) India had lost much of its influence over the shadow zones of the Subcontinent because of Nehru’s preoccupation with non-alignment and third world liberation. The upshot was that nations such as Oman to the west and Malaysia to the east no longer took India seriously as a source of security. But with the end of the Cold War, and the unleashing of Indian capitalism in a globalized framework, neo-Curzonians have sought to define a new “forward” strategy for India that concentrates more specifically on Asia and the Indian Ocean, rather than on the world per se.
To be fair to Nehru, his foreign policy could emanate only from India’s domestic condition, which in the 1950s and 1960s was one of recent freedom from the British, with the wounds of imperialism still fresh. The result, explains Shashi Tharoor, a biographer of Nehru, was a foreign policy perhaps less appropriate for a state than for a liberation movement.5 But as the memory of British rule recedes, its more positive attributes can be appreciated. Hence a neo-Curzonian viewpoint represents much less an Indian variant of American neoconservatism than a return to the realpolitik of the viceroys who, while British, still operated from the same position on the map as India’s current rulers. Jayanta K. Ray of the Maulana Abul Kalam Azad Institute of Asian Studies in Kolkata told me that the viceroys “simply had great geopolitical sense in terms of projecting soft power throughout Asia, occasionally better sense than our own governments since 1947.”
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