The Chaos of Empire

by Jon Wilson

  There was a period of calm in the first few months of 1721, then, in April, the East India Company’s command at Anjengo decided to make a show of power by marching to the polity’s capital in military formation to pay Queen Amutambaran the customary seventy-five pieces of gold due as rent for the fort. On 12 April, with ‘all his best men’, William Gyfford led 120 Company employees dressed in their finest uniforms, with arms and flags and a full trumpet band, up the hill to Attingal castle. Simon Cowse was anxious about rumours he had heard on the way, but Gyfford dismissed his fears. Things took a turn for the worse when Gyfford learnt that his ally Vanjamutta was drunk, and could not intercede on the Company’s behalf. Presents were handed over but when the Company’s soldiers tried to fire a ceremonial salvo they discovered their arms had been tampered with. The gunpowder was damp. Gyfford managed to send a note back to one of the few soldiers left guarding the fort: ‘We are dealt with treacherously’, he said. ‘Take care and don’t frighten the women, we are in no great danger.’

  He was wrong. The British and their Indian employees were massacred. All but a small group of soldiers were killed. Fourteen Portuguese mercenaries from the 120 men who had left Anjengo managed to hobble back ‘miserably wounded, some with 16 cutts and arrows in their bodyes to a lower number, but none without any’. The Company’s leaders were not simply despatched, their bodies were violated and then dismembered. Gyfford’s tongue, the organ responsible for the verbal humiliation of his neighbours, was cut out, his body nailed to a piece of wood and floated down the river. Malheiros was chopped to pieces. Simon Cowse had a better relationship with the men who ambushed the British detachment and escaped the initial wave of ritualistic violence, but on his way back to Anjengo fort he stumbled upon a merchant who owed him money, who took advantage of the chaos to clear his debt by murdering his creditor. With only English sources transcribed from the panicked reports of fleeing Portuguese soldiers it is hard to determine precisely the motivation for the attack. But the nature of the violence meted out on the bodies of the Company’s men suggests that honour played a crucial part. Mass murder and dismemberment could be seen as an attempt to reassert the status of Indians against a group of people who had walled themselves off from local society and humiliated the people among whom they lived.

  With only a handful of wounded European troops, six children, three English women and a two dozen or so Portuguese mercenaries, the fort at Anjengo had a fight on its hands to survive. Anjengo’s inhabitants were besieged from April until October. A concerted attempt from different groups of Attingal’s inhabitants took a while to mobilize, which gave the Company time to send two small ships from Kochi, followed by boats and men from Calicut and Tellicherry. An attack on 24 June was beaten off. Queen Amutambaran made it clear that the fighting was led by local peasant-warriors rather than her; she was far too dependent on the Company’s access to pepper markets to challenge the English. Amutambaran had ‘fled into another’s dominions’ and pleaded with the British to return with big guns to return her to her seat of power.

  Eventually, a fleet arrived from Bombay to recapture the hinterland of Anjengo and raid the countryside. As John Wallis put it, ‘a considerable acquisition of land was conquer’d from the natives’. The British were driven by desire for revenge, to make ‘a sufficient example . . . of the murtherers’. The opportunity to acquire a sizeable territory now presented itself, as well as one to protect the Company’s pepper trade and wreak revenge on the sources of English humiliation. British officers wanted to hunt the ‘murtherers’ and conquer land, to restore ‘the honour of the English Nation’. But this was the autumn of 1721, when the Company at Bombay was building for another attack on Kanhoji Angre. The seizure of land around the Company’s small pepper factory at Attingal was suspended, as the Company’s council in Bombay called its ships back north for the more important project of fighting the Marathas. The British at Anjengo were left with a few troops, an old Dutch pleasure boat and a ‘mouldering fort’ to defend them. The first thing the new British chief of Anjengo did was to sign a new contract for pepper with the queen. The relationship remained difficult. Because of fractious dealings with local traders, the British pepper trade at Anjengo declined and commerce moved to other Company factories.24

  Anjengo was the greatest disaster for British forces in India between the Anglo-Mughal war of 1686–90 and the occupation by Nawab Siraj-ad-Daula of Calcutta in 1756. The sequence of events in this long-forgotten defeat followed the same pattern as later moments of conquest. The Company’s relationship with Indian rulers broke down as they failed to control the flow of money into their treasury. Driven by impatience and motivated by revenge, the Company’s attempt to show its power with violence failed. Defeat was followed by a desire for revenge and for new lands to conquer. The difference between the disaster of Anjengo and later incidences of British conquest had nothing to do with the organization of the British, or even the scale of force at their disposal. Things changed because, in the years that followed the Anjengo war, forces over which the British had no control transformed India’s political landscape.

  Anjengo never became part of the East India Company’s Raj but the war hastened the downfall of Attingal. The Anjengo war showed peasant-warriors in this part of Kerala that Queen Amutambaran and her lordly allies offered no protection to them, so they looked for other sovereigns with whom to ally themselves. The next decade saw conflict between the different regimes which bordered Attingal vying for the support of local inhabitants. Amutambaran’s relative, the raja of the neighbouring state of Travancore, won those battles. His regime did what the others whose histories have been traced in this chapter did: it built an administration to control land and sea more intensively, particularly by allowing trade to flourish. Travancore maintained cordial relations with the English. Understanding the East India Company’s desire for retribution, it presented itself as the best means to ‘punish the enemies’ of the East India Company, in 1731 giving the British a garden in compensation for the ‘loss and damage’ to English interests at Anjengo, for example. Travancore survived despite the growth of British power around it, retaining a strong sense of autonomy until 1947. Even then its rulers tried to maintain their power, making a brief attempt to prevent their state from being swallowed up by the independent state of India.25

  Unlike the story of the state of Travancore, the lives of most of the British men and women discussed in this chapter ended in unhappiness and, usually, an early death. Thomas Chown and William Gyfford both died young, the victims of Indian firepower. They were buried at Mendham’s Point in Bombay. William Mildmay, Rama Kamath’s trading partner, died on his way back to Britain still a young man. Each man’s life was sacrificed in the Company’s effort to assert absolute corporate authority over forces it could not control. Trying always to separate themselves from the Indians, they traded with guns and forts; their fate was wrapped up in the great delusion of British control.

  Katherine Gyfford, née Cooke, survived the longest, but she was a victim of the same power. At Karwar and Bombay, she was celebrated as a heroine who represented pure and steadfast English womanhood against Indian avarice and chaos – or the perception of it. She briefly played the same role in Madras, as she fled the brutality of Anjengo in a small boat with the other Company servants’ wives and children and a small bundle of papers. Such a heroic view of Katherine made sense only as long as she and her three husbands were seen as nothing more than the embodiment of the Company’s power. In fact, William Gyfford’s wealth came from his private dealings, sometimes at the expense of the Company’s profits. Even as Katherine was negotiating her route back to London, the Company in Madras and then Calcutta insisted she pay back the 50,000 rupees they believed Gyfford owed them from his private trading. Katherine complained about her ‘vast complication of misfortune’, suggesting she ‘cannot but think they have used me a little hard’, particularly as her husband ‘met his fate in performing his duty to his masters’. Of
ficers in Madras claimed that Gyfford was responsible for his own death. Commodore Thomas Matthews, captain of the fleet sent from Britain to fight Kanhoji Angre, was ultimately the only Company official willing to take her side. Against the orders of his employers, he gave Mrs Gyfford passage back to Britain in autumn 1722 to flee her creditors. In Britain she spent the next few years battling the East India Company’s lawyers for her share of her dead husband’s assets, suing and being counter-sued in London’s courts of law. By 1732 she’d had enough and accepted £500 ‘to put an end to the dispute between them and us’. For the rest of her life she journeyed back and forth, finding England too cold and expensive but India too dangerous. She and ‘her black maid servant Anna’ settled back in Madras in 1743; but she returned to spend the last years of her life in the Oxfordshire village of Nuffield where she was buried in 1771. By then the East India Company had gone from possessing a scattered string of forts to ruling large stretches of land.26

  4

  PASSIONS AT PLASSEY

  Nader Shah was Mughal emperor for only fifty-seven days, in 1739, but those days created aftershocks that transformed India’s politics. They broke existing centres of authority, massively shrinking the scope of Mughal power. They set loose bands of mounted warriors who ransacked the countryside seeking wealth from villages and towns. They pushed traders behind the walls of whichever power had the strongest forts. For a short period plunder, rather than negotiation, became the most effective tool for creating new centres of wealth. Those fifty-seven days laid the ground which allowed the East India Company to conquer territory in India for the first time.

  Nader Shah was born a long way from India, but he was from the kind of background which for centuries had nurtured men attracted to India as a source of adventure and power. He began life as a mercenary on the southern edge of the Caucasus Mountains between Russia and Iran, recruiting a band of soldiers who seized power in Persia when the 200-year-old Safavid dynasty collapsed in the early 1730s. He reunited Persia and defended the country against invading Turks and Russians. Instead of restoring a Safavid monarch to the throne, in 1736, at the age of thirty-eight, he decided to take the Persian imperial crown himself. Concerned about the security of his authority in Persia, he then marched east in search of legitimacy. If he could be declared Mughal emperor, successor to great central Asian sovereigns like Timur, Babur and Akbar, Nader Shah believed his presently shaky grip on power in Persia itself would be secure.

  By the 1730s Delhi had become the Mughal empire’s weak point. Mughal authority, as we have seen, had been dispersed in a network of strong regional regimes. The capital became a centre of symbolic importance more than administrative or military power. So when Nader Shah marched through the Khyber pass into northern India, most ‘Mughal’ rulers stayed in their home provinces. An overwhelming Persian victory at Karnal on 24 February 1739 was followed by a choreographed ceremony in Delhi’s gold-walled audience hall on 19 March, where Nader Shah took the formal sovereignty of the Mughal empire but left the existing emperor in practical charge. Nader Shah’s aim was to make a name for himself as the conqueror of India but leave the existing political structure intact. But something went badly wrong.

  As usual, tension began in the marketplace, the one arena where people from different places and with different assumptions were forced to interact. Nader Shah’s troops were not used to the unruliness of the Indian mob. When they tried to fix the price of wheat, they were greeted by protests from Delhi merchants. When soldiers then tried to suppress the crowd, they were attacked. To begin with the new emperor trusted his new subjects more than his own troops, saying, ‘some villain from my camp has falsely accused the men of Hindustan of this crime.’ But when townsfolk fired upon Nader Shah himself, he concluded that only a massive show of violence could secure his new dignity and power. Unsheathing his sword on the roof of a mosque in Chandni Chowk, he signalled the beginning of a massacre, and ‘remained there in a deep and silent gloom that none dared disturb’ while the killing went on around him. The kotwal, or head of Delhi’s police, estimated that 20,000 to 30,000 men and women died.1

  After staying less than two months, Nader Shah left with silver, gold, 300 elephants, 10,000 horses and the famous jewelled Mughal Peacock Throne that would became the symbol of Persian sovereign power. On his way out, he placed the ‘crown of Hindustan’ on the head of Emperor Muhammad Shah, who ‘offered’ Kashmir and Sindh to be ruled by Persia in ‘gratitude’. Ananda Ranga Pillai, a merchant and adviser to the French East India Company at the southern coastal city of Pondicherry, asked ‘if such, indeed, be the fate that befell the Emperor of Delhi, need we wonder at the calamities which overtake ordinary men’. He added: ‘Of what avail is the power and wealth of kings, on this earth.’ Nader Shah’s conquest taught that ‘[t]hese are perishable’.

  Nader Shah’s eruption did not dent eighteenth-century India’s prosperity as most of the soldiers who helped him conquer Delhi spent their plunder in India. But the Persian conquest did corrode the systems which held together eighteenth-century India’s polity. The Mughal empire’s authority to arbitrate between rivals in India’s provinces vanished, allowing civil war to proliferate. Credit networks temporarily disappeared, making it harder to transfer money from one place to another. The British found it difficult to remit money through Indian bankers from Surat to Calcutta for example; the banker they relied on in Bengal had begun ‘withdrawing all his money from the Europeans as well as the natives’ in response to the shock of Mughal decline. The collapse of public finances meant groups which felt they had a legitimate claim on the state’s resources started harassing local populations to collect it, rather than asking at the treasury. A time of prosperity for some, the years after 1739 were a period of insurgency and disorder for others, as social groups who had previously been kept in check by the complex balance of Mughal politics asserted their autonomous power over India’s small towns and the countryside. With its forts and armed forces, the East India Company was designed to protect itself against political violence. The chaos of the 1740s and 1750s was a time when it thrived.2

  Self-assertion

  Robert Clive was the greatest beneficiary of the transformation caused by Nader Shah’s conquest. Clive was the eldest of thirteen children born to a well-connected lawyer and former Member of Parliament from the small town of Market Drayton in Shropshire. His background, as the member of an ambitious but not wealthy family of minor gentry, was typical of East India Company officials. Somehow or other though, it seems to have given him a peculiar gift for ‘self-assertion’, as the Bengali writer Nirad C. Chaudhuri put it. Clive is often thought responsible for the beginning of the Company’s empire in southern India, and then for the Battle of Plassey, the first moment when a British army asserted military dominance over a large area of territory in India. But Clive’s greatest talent was telling stories which put him at the centre of the action. In reality forces over which he had no control shaped the course of events.3

  Clive first arrived in Madras as a 19-year-old in 1744. In the five years since Nader Shah had conquered and left, the politics of south-east India had been transformed by the invasion of Maratha armies marauding in search of money they could no longer collect from Mughal treasuries. Until 1739, the far south-east of India had been part of the Mughal province of Arcot, ruled by increasingly autonomous Nawabs; the area to the north, now the Indian states of Telengana and Andhra, was governed by the Viceroy of the Deccan, a man with the title Nizam ul-Mulk (‘Regulator of the Realm’), who had authority over all the Mughal empire’s territories in the south of India. But their deals with a succession of Mughal emperors let the Marathas claim 35 per cent of revenue throughout these lands. Until 1739, that money had reluctantly been paid directly from the Nawab or Nizam’s treasuries. As the Nizam wrote, ‘if I had the necessary strength to destroy them [the Marathas] and their homelands, I would not have asked for meetings, mutual consultations and united action.’ But Nader Shah’s invasi
on broke the credit networks and emptied the treasuries which sustained the political order of southern India. Instead of negotiating with regional states, the Marathas sent bands of horsemen to collect revenue directly from local leaders scattered throughout the region’s towns and villages. By 1744, Arcot had seen five years of raiding by the Marathas, and the fracturing of political power into dozens of petty principalities and a myriad of fractious local powers. ‘Every officer who had been entrusted with a petty government was introduced as a na[wab]’, the Nizam said while travelling through the region. One day he is supposed to have exclaimed, ‘I have seen, this day, eighteen nawabs in a country where there should be one, scourge the next fellow who comes with that title.’4

  Robert Clive’s English education gave him no inkling of the Mughal and Maratha politics which would shape his career. His childhood allowed him to imagine India as a place to make money quickly, perhaps also as a scene of Britain’s ancient quarrel with France. Writing home in his first months, the homesick nineteen-year-old said his purpose was no more than ‘to provide for myself & . . . being of service to my Relations’. His first fighting in the region was indeed driven by English conflict with France. When war broke out between the two European powers and Madras briefly occupied by the French in 1748, Clive managed to escape, enlist in the Company’s army and then helped defend the second British force in the region, Fort St. David. But it was as part of a Company army allied to Indian forces that Clive made his name.