by Jon Wilson
Later British officers saw Bengal as a place peculiarly vulnerable to these malign natural forces. In reality, though, they found it very difficult to find evidence for such a devastating famine in Bengal’s recent history. The last similar event occured in 1574, when the Mughal conquest of Bengal had only just begun. Between then and 1769, the back and forth of Mughal politics ensured ecological shocks did not cause human disasters. Good years created surpluses of food and money, which could then be redistributed to feed people in lean times. Bengal’s little kings and Mughal rulers used their reserves to buy grain, to feed the poor, to accept the late payment of land revenue and lend money to farmers to get them started again if their crops were wiped out. This was not an economy with a high rate of growth, and living standards were poor by today’s standards. But bad harvests, in 1737 and 1738 for example, did not create large mortality rates. India before the British was, after all, a polity where power depended partly on consent, and resistance and flight were options for subjects who did not like the way a ruler behaved. Maintaining political authority needed political leaders to be sensitive to the needs of subjects when their livelihood was under threat. It was that sensitivity the British lacked.52
By 1769, twelve years after the ‘conquest’ of Plassey, the political conditions that prevented famine had evaporated. As the British themselves noted, the decline of commercial security and rise of local violence meant the bonds of trust that bound traders to each other had collapsed. In 1768, the Calcutta council warned of the ‘danger of a complete breakdown in the commercial life of Bengal’. Next year, Richard Becher worried that ‘this fine country, which flourished’ even under what he imagined had been ‘the most despotic and arbitrary government, is verging towards ruin’. ‘Gentlemen in the Company’s service’ were blamed for making massive profits by hoarding grain. Desperate to feed the men needed to defend their forts, the Company seized rice from merchants’ stores, giving it to builders and soldiers who threatened to desert unless they were fed. The biggest cause of death by famine was not the absence of grain but inflation, a rapid increase in the price of rice. Hardest hit were agricultural servants, weavers, boatmen, anyone who lived on their wages rather than the food they grew themselves.
Squeezed by British revenue collectors in lean years, local nobles could afford to distribute little to the starving. The Company itself offered almost no relief. One Company servant, whose account of the catastrophe was printed in a London newspaper, observed forty dead bodies within twenty yards of his window, ‘besides hundreds laying in the agonies of death for want’. The anonymous officer sent his servant out to demand that the living ‘move further off’ for fear of contaminating his house. They refused, he said, shouting, ‘Baba! Baba! My Father! My Father! This affliction comes from the hands of your countrymen, and I am come here to die, if it pleases God, in your presence.’53
The thousands who wearily walked to the British ‘presence’ in Calcutta and other towns and cities were animated by a memory of the way political authorities were meant to behave. Protection in bad times was the price rulers were supposed to pay for their subjects’ submission, labour and cash. Those sad marches mark the recognition by Indians that the East India Company possessed some kind of sovereign authority, which should be held to account in the same way as other rulers. But the limited distribution of food, and the British insistence on a rigid revenue demand whatever the condition of the harvest, marked a clear breach of the mutual obligations which bound rulers to those they ruled. The Company’s victories at Plassey and Buxar gave the British a right to demand tax, and also some kind of capacity to govern. But the East India Company evaded the responsibility that Indians (or, for that matter, the British in Britain) thought were a consequence of sovereign power. They would continue to do so in the years to come.
Heaven-born
In these years of turmoil and famine in Bengal, the citizens of London looking for something to do on a summer night might very well have paid sixpence to take a boat from Westminster. The boat would have taken them across and down the river to the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens. There, they would join perhaps 1,000 others, far more on special occasions, to stroll, gossip and eat along tree-lined walks lit by hundreds of lamps. The English prided themselves that such ‘entertainments’ were conducted without a police force, and ‘without tumult and disorder, which often disturb public diversions of France’. A French observer complained that the English there looked as glum as if they were at a bank. If they had taken dinner, our gloomy pleasure-seekers would have sat in a pavilion decorated with paintings by the artist Francis Hayman. The pictures Hayman painted in the 1740s were amusing distractions, of dancing milkmaids, girls playing badminton or scenes from Shakespeare. During the early 1760s the subjects became more serious. The gardens’ proprietor asked Hayman for a series of six massive works commemorating British victories in the Seven Years War with France. One was of General Wolfe’s victory in Quebec. Another, a scene without a Frenchman in sight, was of Robert Clive meeting a grateful Mir Jafar after the Battle of Plassey.54
When news of Plassey reached Britain in the autumn of 1757, the British were looking for a hero. War with France was going badly. ‘We had lost our glory, honour and reputation everywhere,’ Prime Minister William Pitt said in Parliament. ‘But’, Pitt went on, ‘in India there the country had a heaven-born general who had never learnt the arts of war.’ Soon after news of Plassey arrived, Clive’s old friend and brother-in-law wrote to Mrs Clive that his ‘health is drunk by as many as the King of Prussia’s’. In July 1760, Clive landed in Britain with a fortune of perhaps £310,000. He was quickly given an Irish peerage, bought an estate in Shropshire and rented a large town house in London’s Berkeley Square. Clive’s intention was not only to enjoy his money but to establish himself as a man of great power. Recounting his great deeds in Bengal was vital to this, as was acting as a generous local benefactor offering prize money at the races, for example.55
But the heroic deeds of men who won wars in India could only be celebrated if the East India Company continued to be a stable source of income for prosperous Britons. Throughout the eighteenth century money-making was the Company’s primary purpose. If the years after Plassey were a time of irrational hope about the possibility of massive riches being shipped back to Britain, they were also a time of financial crisis. Clive’s personal stature suffered as his name became associated with the causes of the Company’s diminishing returns. By 1761, when news of Mir Jafar’s ousting reached London, the Company’s stock had fallen to its lowest price for thirty years. Two years later, the Company had to borrow money from the Bank of England to stay afloat. Clive was blamed by many. His private income, most importantly the money from land he received from Mir Jafar, was seen as cash plundered from the Company’s corporate assets. Clive was both the object and protagonist of infighting between the Company’s proprietors. In 1763 he won a short-term victory in the battle of the councils, managing to persuade Prime Minister George Grenville that the only way to solve the Company’s crisis was to send him to India again with complete civil and military powers. But the brief recovery in his status did not last.
Crisis was followed by a bubble and then another crash. News of Shah Alam II’s grant of the diwani arrived in London in April 1766, causing the Company’s stock price to quickly double in value. Clive’s supporters in London told anyone who would listen that the Company was now ‘in possession of the labour, industry and manufactures of twenty million of subjects’. The diwani would be the ‘salvation of the Company’. Its directors demanded Clive quickly convert cash from Bengal into goods that could be sold in London, for ‘if we do not find ways and means to bring our great acquisitions to centre in England neither the Company nor the nation will reap the expected benefit of them’.56 But the massive imagined transfer of wealth failed to materialize. News of wars with new Indian enemies was received in London. In 1767, the British were fighting a state few Britons had previously heard of, the
rapidly growing southern Indian sultanate of Mysore. Again, the Company needed to borrow money to stay afloat, this time from the government. For many, Clive became the symbol of the private greed that much of the British public associated with India. In the 1768 general election, he won the lowest number of votes in Shrewsbury, only keeping his seat by manoeuvring the winners out on appeal. The next six years saw him try to rebut continual efforts to take away his property and status, eventually pleading that the House of Commons should ‘leave me my honour, take away my fortune’. In fact, the opposite happened. Clive kept his cash by buying support in Parliament, but his reputation collapsed. Tired, ill, disillusioned and angry about the failure of his personal empire, Robert Clive died in November 1774 at the age of forty-nine, from an overdose of opium. It is uncertain whether this was a suicide attempt or if the drug was taken to ease Clive’s increasingly turbulent state of mind.
To begin, the stories Clive and his friends had told in London were received well in a world that valued such heroics. The public, as the painter Allan Ramsay wrote, had a ‘passion for conquest and admiration of conquerors’. As the philosopher David Hume lamented, ‘[h]eroism, or military glory, is much admired by the generality of mankind’. Hume’s point was that the public’s desire for conquest allowed people to forget the uncertain consequences of heroic war, which as often as not were ‘infinite confusions and disorders’. Britain’s distance from India allowed the authors of violence to tell impressive stories about their imposition of power through conquest, which belied the reality of politics in Asia. In fact, Clive’s fate in India was shaped by forces over which he had no control; by Nader Shah’s invasion, by the power and tactics of the Marathas, by Shah Alam’s need for allies. The actions of British officers in the subcontinent were accountable to nothing but the disconnected ideas of India propagated by rival gangs engaged in domestic political battles, and the fickle flow of commodities to London. The voice of Indian politics was mostly silent in Britain.57
The failure of British power in Asia was communicated in one blunt, inarticulate medium: money. Revenue did not follow rhetoric. The boom which accompanied stories about glorious moments of conquest was followed by a bust caused by the anarchy over which the Company presided. Brought down by the East India Company’s stock price as much as anything else, Robert Clive was a victim of the delusory idea of power that he had helped to create. His life was governed by the effort to persuade people he was a man able to impose his authority on events, but in the end that effort merely heightened the gap between rhetoric and reality.
Francis Hayman’s portrait of Clive did not depict the Bengal famine, but the viewer enjoying dinner on a pleasure trip to Vauxhall Gardens might have been touched by the painting’s sense of uncertainty. The painting depicts Mir Jafar on a field spread with the carnage of war, beseeching Clive to support his claim to the throne. Mir Jafar’s war elephant stands stately and subdued. Clive’s horse is rearing, perhaps a symbol of the unbridled, unpredictable passion that lay beyond British force. The Union flag flutters above Clive’s head, symbolizing British victory. Yet this is not the moment that founded an empire. Clive is the magnanimous champion, but he has his arms outstretched, too. The two men are engaged in a conversation, to which there has been no resolution. The painting does not portray a settled state. What the battle was fought for, and what victory would produce, seemed still very much in doubt.
5
NEW SYSTEMS
The last quarter of the eighteenth century was a time of revolutionary change across the globe. Patriots expelled the British from their thirteen North American colonies. Republicans executed the French king and then France’s liberal state marched into every corner of Europe. Spain’s American empire was divided between a succession of republics. On both sides of the Atlantic, ancient establishments and old elites were displaced. Land was taken over by new men wielding a different kind of power, by lawyers and officials with no capacity to command the loyalty of bands of men and women, but who possessed money and bureaucratic authority in its place.1
In India, in the lands which the East India Company had conquered in Robert Clive’s wars, change was more subtle, but dispossession no less real. It was not revolutionary ideology or the desire for military authority that transformed Indian society in the territories the British conquered. Social change was wrought instead by forms of government that anxious East India Company’s officials used to defend their new position. This was a profoundly conservative revolution, created as ideologies designed to prevent upheaval in Europe were put into practice in India to defend British power. In London the Anglo-Irish Whig Edmund Burke railed against the revolution in France for annihilating aristocratic grandeur. In Asia, his ideas about land and property had the unintended effect of dispossessing old lords. It was the same kind of men as in France or America – clerks, revenue officers and accountants – who prospered at the expense of the old aristocracy.
The revolution occurred as the East India Company introduced a new system of government to the territory conquered during the middle of the eighteenth century, in particular to the arc which curves from the foothills of the Himalayas, through Bengal and Bihar along the northern Coromandel coast and Madras. These regions were prosperous and well governed under the rule of the Mughal empire and its Nawabi successors. Here, India’s eighteenth-century regimes shared political authority with local leaders, with the men and women the Mughals demeaningly called zamindars. For the first twenty years after the Company’s conquests, the British stayed in their fortified cities and trading posts, summoning landholders and revenue collectors to negotiate the terms on which they would pay revenue and submit to the Company’s power. Most of the time, these landholder-kings were left to rule with little challenge to their authority.
In the 1790s, a new system led to the spread of British officers from the Company’s fortified port cities, from Bombay, Madras and Calcutta, to small settlements scattered throughout the Indian countryside where they set up their offices and tried to build a new kind of regime. The task of Company officers changed dramatically in these years. In the 1770s, only a fifth of the East India Company’s 430 civil officers had been based outside the capitals of the East India Company’s three provinces, the ‘presidencies’ of Calcutta, Madras and Bombay. Most were merchants. By the end of the 1790s, the British-born civil service had increased to more than 600. Almost half were scattered in the mofussil, the upcountry regions of India, as tax collectors and local judges. Throughout the East India Company’s eastern lands, the rule of merchants and warriors had been replaced by the administration of bureaucrats.
The aim of the new system was to secure the Company’s collection of revenue without the need to negotiate with India’s local elites. The Company was motivated by the same desire to have its relationship with Indian society fixed in writing which drove the first Anglo-Mughal war a hundred years before. Only now, fixity was being imposed on local landholders not great governors and kings. The idea was to replace face-to-face conversation with written rules. The rules insisted landholders paid a fixed amount of money each month with rigorous punctuality, and did not disturb the peace. In return their property rights were to be secured. The system was supposed to give the British stable allies to buttress the Company’s power, in return for their being allowed to profit peacefully from their lands. But the system undermined the negotiation and face-to-face conversation which had been so essential to the politics of eighteenth-century India. As a result, it brought dispossession and the collapse of a once rich region’s wealth.2
Refractory lords
Polavaram was one place transformed by the new system. Thirty miles inland in Telugu-speaking country 300 miles north of Madras, the Polavaram estate straddled the hills and plains at the point where the Godavari, India’s second longest river, broadens out before spilling into the sea. The lowland portion of Polavaram was on well-watered soil rich in nutrients. The nearby town of Rajahmundry was an important Mughal
trading centre, a place where cotton from the black, dry soil of the interior and textiles from weaving villages were exchanged for money and shipped throughout Asia and Europe. Attracted by the region’s prosperity, the dynasty that ruled Polavaram had only moved to the region in the late 1600s. By the time the British arrived they had created a powerful local regime.3
This was a mobile world in which local rulers needed to negotiate hard to keep people with different interests on their land. The Raja of Polavaram could threaten peasants who did not pay with a visit from men armed with lathis, or big sticks. But peasants had a choice. With plenty of empty land and rival manufacturing centres, there were other possible livelihoods nearby. There was always the option of fleeing to the hills. The raja’s power depended on a retinue of perhaps 1,000 armed men. But it also relied on the local lord paying for markets and travellers’ rest houses, funding temples and schools, giving rice to people in need and lending money to pay for the rice plants sown each year. Their manipulation of the politics of investment and redistribution meant that, by the 1790s, the Polavaram rajas had built authority over more than a hundred villages, possessed four forts and a dozen temples. Authority was built up in the same way throughout India’s eastern riverine and coastal region, in Bengal as well as the south.4
