by Jon Wilson
Calcutta was reconquered on 2 January 1757. The Company’s army carried on to Bengal’s second biggest port of Hughli, twenty miles north, and ‘made a prodigious slaughter’ of the Nawab’s army. Shortly afterwards, on 9 February, the Nawab of Bengal signed a treaty that gave the Company the right to trade without paying taxes, to mint coins and a promise of compensation for the cash lost in the occupation of Calcutta. After the signing of the treaty John Corneille wrote that ‘the English after an eight months banishment were restored again to their settlement, and not only to the full enjoyment of their ancient rights and privileges but many more’.26
Clive and Watson believed Siraj decided to sign a peace treaty with the East India Company because he was cowed into submission by the British army. ‘Arms’, Admiral Watson wrote, ‘are more to be dependent on, and I dare say will be much more prevalent than any treaties or negotiations.’ In fact, Siraj’s agreement to a peace treaty was shaped by circumstances beyond Bengal of which the British had only an inkling. In 1756 and early 1757, Delhi was in a state of political turmoil once again. Nader Shah’s conquest of 1739 had started a sequence of western invasions, as northern India once again became a field for thousands of adventurers, warriors and empire-builders from Persia and Afghanistan. The greatest of these was Ahmad Shah Durrani, a Pashtun soldier from the Afghan city of Herat who began his military career in Nader Shah’s army. Ahmad Shah invaded northern India seven times between 1748 and 1767, but perhaps the most devastating incursion occurred in the final months of 1756 and first part of 1757. Siraj-ad-Daula was concerned that warriors invading from the west were about to pour into Bengal, so at the beginning of February 1757 he believed that a quick agreement to the East India Company’s demands might help enlist the British as allies.27
John Corneille thought the treaty with Siraj-ad-Daula would end the fighting for good, but then news that war had finally broken out with France reached India. The troops Corneille commanded became part of ‘a scheme . . . towards dispossessing [the French] out of their settlements in Bengal’. Corneille left Vizagapatam for Calcutta on 1 March 1757. His first action in Bengal was to take part in the British conquest of the East India French Company’s small fort at the town of Chandernagore, fifteen miles north of Calcutta, an event that gave the lieutenant of the Devonshires his greatest sense of honour. With the defeat of the French the British had at last ‘recovered that character which their pusillanimous behaviour at Calcutta had justly lost them, and were once more looked on as a great and powerful people’, Corneille argued. Still keen on enlisting the English as partners against Ahmad Shah, Siraj-ad-Daula wrote to Clive of his ‘inexpressible pleasure’ at the British victory over their old rivals.28
Despite Siraj’s clear interest in negotiating with the British, the months between March and June saw the relationship between the two finally collapse. The exchange of threats and insults, humiliation and revenge that had begun in June 1756 created a cycle of antagonism that neither side was able to step out of, despite the apparent willingness of both to do so.
Young, and with little experience in the practical arts of statecraft, Siraj-ad-Daula was a man ruled by a more passionate desire to seek speedy revenge than his predecessors had been. ‘Siraj-ad-Daula was not the man to forget what he regarded as an insult,’ Jean Law, French chief at Chandernagore observed. He had quickly become ‘incensed against the English’. Richard Becher, one of the most thoughtful British observers, argued that Siraj had decided to occupy Calcutta to begin with in a ‘sudden gust of passion’.
Yet even Siraj tried to move beyond the cycle of anxious violence. He knew the rules of Mughal statecraft, the politics of combining friendship with fear, even if he wasn’t always experienced enough to put them into practice. Throughout his exchanges with the East India Company Siraj tried to play the part of the statesman, appealing to the British to act in the way appropriate for merchants. ‘You have taken and plundered Hughli,’ he wrote to Admiral Watson in March, ‘and made war upon my subjects: those are not actions becoming merchants.’ As traders and men sharing a common belief in the same God, he thought the British had a duty to keep their promises. In February, he compared them unfavourably to the Hindu Marathas. ‘The Mahrattas are bound by no gospel, yet they are strict observers of treaties,’ Siraj wrote. ‘It will therefore be a matter of great astonishment and hard to be believed, if you, who are enlightened with the gospel, should not remain firm, and preserve the treaty you have ratified in the presence of God and Jesus Christ.’29
For their part, British officers ignored Siraj’s allusion to prophets and scriptures. They spoke as if being merchants was inextricably linked to the use of military force. They believed that the honour of a merchant in Asia always depended on his capacity for violence. The British addressed the Nawab as a fellow warrior, believing that he shared with them a martial ethos. Clive and many of his compatriots thought anything other than an explicit admission of the Nawab’s contrition an insult to their martial power.
Indian friends of the British tried to encourage a less aggressive tone. Commenting on one draft of a letter that Clive intended to send to Siraj, the Company’s ally Manik Chandra complained that Clive used ‘improper expressions’. Clive replied that it would not be consistent with his ‘Duty to the Company or their honour’ to write in submissive language. ‘We are come to demand Satisfaction, not to entreat his favour.’ ‘I know you are a great Prince and a great warrior. I likewise for these past ten years have been consistently Fighting in these parts and it has pleased God Almighty always to make me successful,’ he wrote to the Nawab.
While Siraj’s unusually quick passion played some part in the breakdown, the anxious, prickly sense of honour the British carried with them in the subcontinent contributed the most to the escalation of conflict. As they had been in the run-up to the Anglo-Mughal war seventy years earlier, the Company’s officers thought they could not achieve self-respect in the subcontinent without achieving total dominance over their rivals. As then, a concern with the profits of the East India Company underlaid British actions. But it was over-laid in turn by an anxious, often paranoid attitude which interpreted every possible slight as a major humiliation, and considered violence the only means of restoring honour.30
The difference was that the fractured political landscape of Bengal in the 1750s gave the British allies in their project of intended revenge. Since becoming Nawab, Siraj had failed to successfully enlist powerful magnates with sufficient offers of friendship, particularly alienating merchants and nobles from the commercial cities of Dhaka and Patna. In the spring of 1757, merchants from Patna had started talking about ousting Siraj. They reached out to Rai Durlabh, Governor of Dhaka, the man whose son had fled to Calcutta but who since then had maintained a fractious friendship with Siraj. They also enlisted traders and military commanders from the Nawab’s capital at Murshidabad. Central to the conspiracy were the Jagat Seths, the biggest bankers in Bengal, who increasingly believed Siraj was incapable of providing the security needed for commerce to flourish. To begin with, the Company was not involved in the plot. With good reason as it turned out, Bengal’s rebellious merchants and magnates worried that the East India Company would twist any situation to their own advantage, but the Company’s possession of money and arms made them too useful an ally to ignore. In May 1757, the conspirators approached William Watts, the British agent in Murshidabad, and the Company asked to join the coalition against Siraj.31
The conspiracy to oust Siraj-ad-Daula would have happened even without the Company. The British march on Chandernagore and then Plassey would have happened without the conspiracy. The plot gave the British an alternative candidate with whom to replace the new Nawab. The plan which developed from the beginning of May 1757 was to replace Siraj-ad-Daula with his military paymaster, Mir Jafar, a man whom Clive believed ‘as general [sic] esteemed as the other was detested’. It also threatened to divide the Nawab’s army, giving the Company a chance of military victory. After t
hey ‘weighed and debated’ the proposal, Calcutta’s council decided that ‘a revolution in Government’ would be good for the Company. Siraj-ad-Daula’s ‘word, honour and friendship’ could no longer be trusted, so a new Nawab was needed in order for British interests to thrive. To set the plot in motion, Clive and Watson marched their troops north from Chandernagore on 19 June. John Corneille did not believe this confrontation to be the result of rational thought. The East India Company had already received everything it wanted from the Nawab. Corneille thought the decision to fight was an act of passion, driven by a desire for retribution more than profit. ‘Thus situated’, he wrote to his father, ‘with minds still angered against the nabob the tempting opportunity of pursing further revenge could not be withstood.’32
The British army certainly seems to have been ruled by alternating fits of rage and fear. Cooler British minds had cautioned against fighting, saying violence would ‘throw the country again into confusion’. But the 784 British soldiers (613 infantry and 171 artillery) in Clive’s force of 3000 were driven on by a desire for ‘satisfaction’ at the affront they believed they had suffered when the Nawab drove them out of Calcutta. Troops marched to the small fortified settlement of Katwa, forty miles south of the capital of Bengal, and the town which Marathas soldiers had used as their base to conquer Bengal in the 1740s. The march north to Plassey had been hot-headed, but by the time the Company’s army had trudged ninety miles north in the early monsoon rain, passions had cooled somewhat and the British were frightened about the possible consequences of their actions.
In the dark, wet night of 21 June that mood of fear overcame Clive and he was wracked by indecision. Sleep eluded him as he considered the prospects and risks of fighting Siraj. Only a few miles away from Siraj’s army, the real limits of British power was apparent. Clive did not know where his potential Indian allies were. He had no news of Mir Jafar and it was rumoured that a Maratha force was marching to Bengal again. Having failed to displace Alivardi Khan from Bengal, they thought they would have a better chance now that a younger, weaker successor was on the throne. Perhaps Clive should fortify his position, and wait for Maratha support, as he had done six years earlier at Arcot. Or perhaps the Nawab would come to terms. Clive had called a council of war the previous evening, a majority of whose members shared his mood. By a vote of twelve to six, the British decided to call off their march north and wait for the Marathas; unsurprisingly, Corneille voted against action. An hour after the meeting ended, however, Clive had changed his mind and decided to continue the march. But still he did nothing, and he did not sleep that night.33
Many biographers see this moment as a sign of Clive’s erratic temperament, evidence of the tendency for destructive self-doubt that accompanied his capacity for brilliant action. Yet Clive’s paralysis tells us more about the mood of empire than the mind of one man. Throughout their time in India, from the 1680s to the 1940s, British officers were impatient in trying to assert their command over circumstances. They used force to make money and secure their settlements, but also to prove to themselves that they were men of honour who could act decisively. As much as anything else, Clive’s military exploits were driven by his desire to put himself in a heroic light in England. The same was true for British officers in India for more than a century. Yet their power in India was always limited by their reliance on allies they usually did not trust and often found difficult to understand. The British idea of power was always out of kilter with their true ability to act. This brought about a strange, indecisive state of mind, one that oscillated between violent action and profoundly paranoid paralysis.34
The following afternoon, after a day without rain, passions prevailed once again. Clive ordered his soldiers to march overnight the fifteen miles to the village of Palashi, a mile south of the Nawab’s army. By three o’clock on the morning of 23 June, troops were in position opposite Siraj’s forces in a mango grove. At first light Siraj-ad-Daula tried to surround the smaller British army, commencing with an artillery bombardment. But three of four sections of the great arc intended to annihilate the Company were commanded by Mir Jafar and his fellow plotters, and did not take part in the fighting. Clive’s plan had been to hold on until sunset, then launch a surprise attack on Siraj-ad-Daula’s camp at night. At midday it began to rain again. The Nawab’s army had not kept their powder dry but the British army had. When they tried to charge, Siraj’s forces were cut down by the Company’s nine cannon. As Clive changed into dry clothes following the downpour, his second in command launched a counter-attack. Initially angry that his authority had been usurped, Clive then joined the charge. Demoralized by the rain, and seeing that such a large part of his army refused to charge, Siraj-ad-Daula ordered his forces to retreat to Murshidabad to fight another day. Most of his army, however, fled in panic.35
Since 1757 historians have tended to play down the importance of ‘the Battle of Plassey’, as it became known. They have suggested it was the lucky result of political negotiations, ‘the successful culmination of an intrigue’ as Percival Spear put it, rather than a real fight. Such judgement depends on an unrealistic idea of what determines the outcome of normal wars. There was nothing particularly unusual about the fact that Plassey was shaped by forces off the field. Until mass mechanized warfare, most battles were determined by who didn’t fight rather than the capacity of those who did. Siraj lost because his forces reflected his own limited capacity to assert authority over the constituent parts of Bengali society. Defeat was a consequence of the breakdown of political authority caused by the social upheaval that followed the invasion of Nader Shah. In June 1757, the East India Company was better able to hold a fighting force together than its enemies. The important point, though, is that the real British ability to lead a small body of men on the battlefield did not give them the capacity to command the submission of the province’s twenty million people afterwards. Plassey did not found an empire. It merely ensured that political chaos endured in Bengal far longer than it would have done otherwise.36
Insolence and interruptions
Clive’s army marched on to the capital, Murshidabad, where Mir Jafar ‘found himself in peaceful possession of the palace and city’. The new Nawab asked to be formally recognized by the force he believed had brought him to power. On 1 July, a week after Plassey, Clive escorted the new ruler onto the throne at Murshidabad. A day later, Siraj-ad-Daula was found and killed by the new Nawab’s son. Clive imagined that these events meant Mir Jafar was ‘firmly and durably seated on the throne’. ‘[T]he whole country has quietly submitted to him,’ he optimistically wrote. With 25,000 ‘matchless seapoys . . . there shall be nothing wrong to make the country flourish and subjects happy’, he insisted in a letter to the Mughal emperor in Delhi asking for Mir Jafar to be acknowledged as Bengal’s new ruler. In Calcutta Britons celebrated the ‘revolution’ so vigorously that women danced until their feet were sore.37 Clive later said Plassey was an act that acquired and delivered ‘absolute power’ to a regime governed by allies of the Company. In fact, it was a moment that handed power to no one.38
Many of Bengal’s inhabitants experienced the beginning of the British-backed regime as a time of chaos. Merchants were particularly vulnerable to the collapse of authorities able to maintain a balance between different interests, and the undisciplined expansion of British power. For example, two weeks after Mir Jafar took the throne in Murshidabad the warehouse of the trader Mir Ashraf was raided. This took place in Patna, 300 miles west of and upstream from Bengal’s capital on the River Ganges. Ashraf was one of this great Mughal city’s merchant aristocrats, a man whose trade lay at the centre of an urbane, cultured civil society, which supported poetry and music, hospitals for the poor and centres of Muslim piety. With his brother Mir Ashraf ran a business that traded in potassium nitrate, otherwise known as saltpetre, the most important ingredient in gunpowder.39
The raid was led by Paul Pearkes, chief of the East India Company’s factory at Patna, possessor of a
large fortune made from private trade and owner of one of the biggest mansions on the Hughli river. Pearkes claimed Ashraf had been housing French goods. In fact, he had long been desperate to enrich himself from Patna’s saltpetre trade; he wanted to use the Company’s power to create his own private commercial empire. Until Plassey he had been unable to compete with Ashraf’s efficient commercial operation. Pearkes’ raid was an attempt to take advantage of the change in Bengal’s balance of power and to undermine a commercial rival.
During the first half of the eighteenth century, the prosperity of Patna, like that of other commercial cities, had been secured by a network of urban organizations that mediated between rival interests, underwritten by a Mughal regime concerned with maintaining the local balance of power. These institutions allowed Patna’s trade to grow even after Nader Shah’s invasion. Patna, like Calcutta, was one of the few safe centres for commerce, a haven for merchants and money. The Europeans were a potentially violent presence, the East India Company having at least 170 soldiers to guard its factories and potentially harass its inhabitants. Yet fear of reprisals from the Nawab had prevented anything but small, violent clashes, until now. After Plassey, Ashraf found that the balance of power had changed drastically. He appealed to the city’s merchants, and then to the Nawab’s court in Patna, but to no effect. The commander of the British troops was sympathetic, but had no power over the chief of the Company’s factory. Ashraf wanted only to trade in peace. ‘God preserve the reign of the present nabob and that all may rest in quietness,’ he wrote to Amir Chand.
